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.

It’s not peak fiction, but you can see it from here.

Yakuza: Like A Dragon — referred to as Yakuza 7 from here on — was pitched to me by a couple of friends as one of the greatest games ever made. That’s a tough sell, largely because I’m a miserable dickhead who seriously (don’t laugh!) writes about video games. Putting forth anything as being one of the best is a fucking gamble, because you’re not playing with good odds. There are a lot of works out there, and only a couple get to be the best. It tends to make it hurt worse when, almost inevitably, it’s not actually one of the best; you get your hopes up, and then the work doesn’t live up to the inflated goals you set for it, and then you’re left feeling disappointed.

Luckily, though, that’s not the case here. I don’t think Yakuza 7 is as good as I was told it was, but it’s certainly still pretty good. Great, even! There are some pacing and writing issues that drag it down, but what’s here is legitimately impressive. I don’t really care for RPGs as a genre, and I especially don’t care for games that ask for thirty to forty hours of my time, so the fact that this is still scoring as high as it is may as well be a sign of the end times. The four horsemen are a yakuza, an ex-nurse, an office worker, and a triad boss.

It’s immensely funny that, in an era where the largest development studios are playing it as safe as they possibly can, RGG Studios decided that Yakuza is no longer an action game. It’s such a ridiculous fucking idea. Some positive reception to an April Fool’s joke was all they needed to go all-in on this? What the fuck? You aren’t supposed to make games like this. And yet, they did; and yet, it works. It works really well, actually. There’s a bit of a problem that AoE skills are absurdly good compared to their single-target little brothers; obviously the single-target skills are king in boss fights, but those are pretty far and few between. Autobattling still takes a while and uses up precious items, and low-level mooks don't run away even when you've got a massive numbers advantage over them; most of the street fights are little more than time wasters, ultimately. Expect to spend the majority of the endgame running away from random encounters simply because they don't pay out in resources more than they take.

Ichiban is a wonderful character, and it's frankly no surprise that many people have latched onto him as hard as they have. Most of the cast is strong, really. I certainly wasn't expecting this to handle social issues as well as it did. It's more than a little hamfisted at times — discussions about "gray zones" and "bleaching white" tend to lean on wordplay a bit too heavily — but it's a pretty solid takedown of blind idealism. Bleach Japan's goals sound, from the outset, to be pretty reasonable. It's only once you dig in and find out what they're actually working towards that it becomes apparent that they're interested solely in enforcing laws, not in ensuring that people benefit from the law. Sure, women being forced to turn to sex work is bad. Homeless people not being able to find a safe spot to sleep is bad. Yakuza gangsters shouldn't be running the streets. The solution, though, is not to deport them, arrest them, and incite a gang war in the hopes they all kill themselves off, respectively. The gray zones are astronomically far from perfect, but blindly adhering to already-oppressive laws serves only to worsen the problem. It's rare to find a work with a positive view on criminal activity that isn't individualistic "fuck-you-I-do-what-I-want" id slop, but rather calls into question the legitimacy of the laws being broken.

I do have a problem with the writing in that it feels mean, sometimes. It happens often enough to be noticeable, and it clashes hard with a lot of what's written elsewhere. Nanba, for example, never really stops being a "homeless guy", even after he manages to get two(!!!) different houses that he stays in. The game just keeps reminding you how bad he smells, because he's homeless: he can debuff enemies because he stinks; he can breathe fire because his breath is just that potent; he can revive allies because none of them want him to give them CPR. It's weird. I don't really feel a sense of malice here, because the game is otherwise pretty fair to homeless people — certainly more than most, as low of a bar as that is. It's more like the game needs a smack upside the head and for someone to tell it that it's not being funny. I feel like it'd smarten up pretty quick.

Yakuza 7 has a bit of a habit. It’s definitely not a good habit, but I’m a little hesitant to call it a bad habit. Yakuza 7 just really loves killing off characters. Whenever a character’s arc comes to a close, they just get merked. The Geomijul goon who shakes down the bar owners? Shot to death. Arakawa? Shot to death. Hoshino? Shot to death. Ogasawara? Probably shot to death. Characters just start dropping like flies the second that they’ve served their narrative purpose. I guess I can understand it, considering that this is ultimately a game about organized crime — nobody walks away from Goodfellas wondering what was up with all of the indiscriminate murder — but it makes it a little difficult to stomach the feel-good ending that follows in the wake of such a bloodbath. Yakuza as a franchise is kind of renowned for being over the top, so this might just be a case of me going to a steakhouse and complaining that they don’t have enough vegetarian options, but I think there’s a bit too much melo in this melodrama.

Where it really came to a head for me was in the final stretch of cutscenes — as good a place as any for it to come to a head, I suppose. After going through a lengthy boss sequence, and then a second boss sequence, and then a third boss sequence, Ichiban finally manages to corner his young master. Masato pulls a gun, points it at Ichiban, and then points it at himself; his life as he knows it is over, and all of his hard work has been pulled out from under him, and he sees no reason to go on. Ichiban, who’s spent the entire game desperately trying to make this fucking stupid asshole see the light, breaks down in tears. He tells Masato that he would have done anything for him, that Masato needs to start over, that he believes Masato can turn a new leaf and be a better person. He caps it off with the line “please don’t make me watch my brother die”, which is so insanely good that I’m getting choked up again writing it out. It’s a phenomenal sequence. It’s written really well, it’s paced really well, and it works. It works better than any single moment in the preceding thirty hours.

Masato then gets stabbed by a lackey and bleeds out. Ichiban punctuates the moment with a slow-motion “NOOOOOOOOOOO!”. I roll my eyes because the game is now being stupid. Take it down a notch. You had something really good going, with the whole “choosing to be a better person after spending twenty years fucking up” angle. You don’t need to spoil it by going full soap opera, pretending like you’re gonna kill off the character after all of that. Just roll these obviously fake credits, and show us the scene where Masato is out of the hospital, and — oh, no, you actually killed him off. Jesus. Really? What a waste. I can’t really articulate why this complete bloodbath bothers me so much if not for the fact that it all feels at odds with the fact that this is supposed to be a happy ending. I guess when you’ve got a franchise that’s been running for this long without the universe being reset, it does you well to just kill off as many named characters as you can; people who play the next game won’t be asking where the old characters are if they know that they’re all turning into compost.

A severe difficulty spike right near the end also necessitates a good dose of grinding to get to a point where you can (un)comfortably clear it, which doesn't help the pacing much. You're more-or-less forced to complete the battle arena at least once, and then subsequently forced into the Kamurocho sewers to farm Invested Vagabonds. It's certainly not as egregious as some other RPGs when it comes to how much grinding you're expected to do, but it's still a hefty ask for a game that's already about thirty hours when you're going straight down the critical path. Add in the obscene amount of substories and minigames — some of which are great, some of which very much aren't — and this is a long game. I was definitely starting to lose patience with it by the end.

It's not perfect, but it's not far from it. There's a lot here to love. I think if this had ended somewhere around the halfway point, I wouldn't have a single bad thing to say. The first ten or so hours of Yakuza 7 are masterful, and the remaining minimum twenty are only pretty solid. It's easy to be a lot worse than this.

Don't piss me off. I'm close to leveling up and you look like just enough XP.

Idealistic, to a fault.

I'd like to go completely up my own ass for a second and quote myself in a review I wrote for Citizen Sleeper:

It’s a curious little foible I’ve noticed in a lot of these smaller-scale games with gestures towards socialist thought; pragmatism is dedicated exclusively towards villains, and idealism is dedicated exclusively towards the (virtuous) player character and their (morally unobjectionable) allies.

Given how often this keeps cropping up, I'm thinking of making it something of a hard, observed rule, like Start-to-Crate. It really is everywhere, and The Good Weapon is no exception. It's revealed right at the end of the narrative that the twenty nerve clusters that need to be nuked to defeat the capitalism allegory (here named VIGIL) are actually only eighteen in number; regular people have already destroyed two of them without the help of nuclear ordinance. Wake, being a pragmatist — doubtless why she turns heel — had planned to use two hundred-thousand nukes to carpet bomb the entire planet in the hopes of probably eradicating VIGIL. You, however, manage not to fall into a bloodlust once you gain control of the titular weapon. Instead, you uncover the option to identify and precision strike the remaining eighteen clusters in order to liberate the planet. It would, effectively, be a bloodless revolution that could be over and done with in under forty minutes. However, the player character notices that two of the clusters were killed by "ordinary people". They didn't need nukes. Since the conflict started, these ordinary people have managed to take out about ten percent of the capitalist allegory; 10% of communism has been built. The player character comes to the conclusion that because two clusters have been already killed without nukes, none of the nukes should be fired. Ordinary people should continue to fight VIGIL on their own, and kill off the remaining eighteen clusters by themselves. As for you, you're going to go practice self-care. You and your hot girlfriend named Sleep are gonna go hang out and let the other people fix the planet for you. You could say alongside you, if you're feeling generous.

This is a total resignation, not a triumph. VIGIL still exists. VIGIL is still actively hurting people. VIGIL is still the number one cause of just about every single problem in the world. I cannot think of a single fucking reason why you wouldn't launch the eighteen nukes into the exact spots that they needed to go. Sure, launching the entire stockpile is going to end up murdering the world, and the game even says that it's not guaranteed to work — it actually would have, given the later reveals, but that's besides the point — but there's no presented downside for only using a couple of them on the spots where the clusters are guaranteed to be. If it was specified that the clusters were tucked away under major city hubs, and blowing them up would cause untold civilian casualties in the name of "liberating" them, that'd be a different argument. But we're ultimately given no reason to expect that these surgical strikes wouldn't work, and even further that they wouldn't be the best possible option.

Mark Twain once wrote about how there were two Reigns of Terror in France. The first, and most commonly known, was as swift as it was brutal. It was a terror fueled by passion, by rage, where the downtrodden killed and killed and killed in retaliation for all they had suffered. Heads rolled, the streets ran with blood, and while their goals of abolishing the monarchy were met, it was at an incalculable cost of innocent lives. But the suffering of the revolutionaries that brought them to that point, Twain argued, was the second terror: the slow death, the burning at the stake, the starvation, the cold, the humiliation. To fire two hundred-thousand nukes in the name of overthrowing VIGIL would be the first terror. To walk away from it all and allow VIGIL to continue in its harvest of humanity would be the second. To fire exactly eighteen nukes at the nerve clusters without any named consequence would not so much be a terror as it would be a complete and utter victory for humanity without a single string attached.

I'm harping on this hard, but that's largely because I think it's standing on the line between an oversight and a fundamental disagreement between myself and the author. If the point to get across is that slaughtering innocents in the name of the greater good is indefensible, that's a good argument; if the point to get across is that other people will eventually beat capitalism for you, so just chill out and you won't have to get your hands dirty, I think that's a terrible argument. Whichever way it falls turns this from a piece I'd recommend to an ideological dumpster. Ultimately, I don't know. I'll have to let it hang over my review like the Sword of Damocles.

It's unfortunate, because I do dig a lot of the individual elements of this. I liked the prose; the parenthetical sentence fragments that keep interrupting other sentences seem to be acting as intrusive thoughts, which was a little annoying, but mostly interesting. The little bloop sound effect that played whenever VIGIL talked served as a pretty good way to make it feel voiced and otherworldly without actually having voice acting. The art is mostly good, as well — certainly head and shoulders above a lot of its contemporaries.

But, this being a visual novel, the writing is always going to be a sticking point. I can't say with any real degree of confidence that what's written here works. I'd like for it to. It's certainly in need of a second draft, if nothing else. If the goal really was just to push the idea that you ought to discard revolutionary power and zeal and hope that the world sorts itself out, then The Good Weapon is bad. If it's just a sloppy way of saying that the ends don't justify the means, then The Good Weapon is pretty alright. Which one you believe will depend on how fair you feel like being towards the author.

Considering how the plot is about using nukes to bring about communism, this might be the first Posadist video game.

Called shot.

About half a year ago, I said that Mike Klubnika was a developer to watch out for, and I was right. When you openly announce that somebody somewhere is going to make something big someday, the inevitable question becomes when exactly that someday is going to be. It's not often that it's within the year. Buckshot Roulette is as simple and as short as it is sweet; a gameplay loop so tight and an aesthetic so masterfully constructed that the only holes that can be poked in it are little more than petty gripes.

Maybe I'm starting to get soft in my old age, but I didn't expect the act of sticking a low-poly shotgun in my face in a video game to make me shrink back in my chair. It's because of something rotten in the atmosphere. Where a more amateur project would set this in any indistinct, grubby basement, or dark, empty cabin somewhere — a Blair Witch Project, an Inscryption — Klubnika finds a setting more sinister in the open. The entire game takes place in a side room of a nightclub, just steps away from the thumping hardbass and the flashing lights. Rather than getting lost, slipping between the margins and winding up alone in a place where nobody could ever find you, you could return to civilization in a couple of strides. Yet the player sticks around, and for what? For money? It's not for much money. Sixty grand. Is that enough to stake your life on? The harrowing thought is that it is. Three years of rent, a down payment on a house, twelve straight months where you wouldn't have to concern yourself with working. I'm sure we've all had a conversation where someone proposes an idea that you'd do something dangerous or embarrassing for a certain amount of money, and asks you to set a dollar amount; how much for you to streak through the middle of this field, how much for you to jump off of that ledge, how much for you to reach for that cop's gun? Have you ever settled on sixty grand? Have you ever been desperate enough that you'd put your life on the line for less?

Buckshot Roulette adheres closely to an old piece of writing advice I once heard, which was to take something that everyone knows and add just enough of a twist that people wonder how they never thought of it themselves. When I heard "Russian Roulette but with a pump-action shotgun", I thought the idea was kind of stupid. You can't exactly "miss" a shell in a barrel the way that you can miss a round in a revolver cylinder. The game clears it up immediately by filling the shotgun with an assortment of live shells and blanks — Klubnika means "dummies", but he ain't know it — and yeah, duh. Of course that's how you would do it. The concept alone is brought to full effect with the introduction of the items, which allow you to saw the barrel off for extra damage, cycle a shell to waste it and narrow the odds, or outright peek at what's chambered to see if the next shot will go click or if it'll go boom. The dealer eventually stops announcing the amount of live rounds and dummies that are going into the shotgun, forcing you to very suddenly start counting them up before he has the chance to load them all in. There are a lot of neat little turns here, and the game feels remarkably well-realized. I'm not sure how you could do this much better.

The earliest part of the game is a little too heavy on the randomness for my taste, and that's something of an inherent issue. Your initial set of actions may as well just be pulling the arm of a slot machine; you either get lucky from the jump and you win, or you get unlucky from the jump and you lose. It's realistic in the context of taking turns firing a gun into the roof of your mouth, I suppose, but it doesn’t make for an especially engaging gameplay loop. Digging through the item box and pulling out a bloodied contract signed by God is also incredibly corny. Mike, you’re already doing Inscryption better than Daniel Mullins did. Don’t spoil your own good work by bringing over his awful writing.

Still, though, I’ve thought for a while that the titles found in compilations like the Dread X Collections are going to be the way forward for indie horror, and I think this helps to prove that point. Bite-sized projects that you can start and finish in a single sitting with strong atmospheres and interesting twists on what we’re already familiar with are what more developers need to be striving towards. Klubnika continues to impress. If he keeps going at the rate he’s been going, I think he’s got it in him to go down as one of the greatest to ever do it. It’s exciting to see a developer with this much potential who continues to realize it more and more with every passing release. Mark me down as a fan. I want to be here for the long haul.

I’m glad the club has access to a defibrillator that can revive someone who’s taken four shells to the head.

A technical marvel that is completely fucking miserable to play.

I'll get this out of the way, first: Gimmick might be the most impressive game I have ever seen running on a Famicom. I legitimately do not know nor could I begin to understand how a game that's only a few hundred kilobytes managed to pack visuals this pretty, sounds this pleasing, and an actual fucking physics engine onto a cart that ran on a console manufactured in the year 1983. By rights, this should not exist. People everywhere seem to constantly express surprise that Gimmick isn't actually another one of those retro throwback indie games, and they're right to be shocked. This might be the game that sells me on how drastic of an upgrade the Famicom was to the consoles that came before it. The Atari 2600 isn't shit compared to this. I digress. The point to make is that Gimmick really ought to be celebrated as a feat of engineering in video games.

Regrettably, though, video games need to be played.

Looking at Gimmick is significantly more fun than actually interacting with Gimmick. Yumetaro slides around like he's wearing ice skates long before you get to the actual ice level. Emulating rudimentary physics on the Famicom is undoubtedly an impressive feat, but it's handled in way that only manages to frustrate: downward slopes have almost zero friction, so you slide down them too quickly; it takes an obscene amount of time for Yumetaro to stop moving after you stop holding the button; enemies can turn on a dime, with none of them under any obligation to bother observing something as petty as the fundamental forces of the universe.

I was tempted to write about how I'm done giving the time of day to "cruel games", but I think that's prescribing a design intent when that's not necessarily what's here. What I'm ultimately and actually annoyed with is the fact that it's impossible to intuit certain enemy patterns or placements, which is where that feeling of cruelty stems from. The archers in Stage 4 are probably the most obvious and most unfair example, where the only shot you have at dodging their arrows is if you have prior knowledge as to where they actually are; they love shooting you from off-screen, with one placed specifically to catch you at the arc of your jump as you come out from the top of a previous screen, and another waiting at the end of a hallway to snipe you with a projectile that is literally a single pixel thick and roughly the same shade as the background. It's trivial to deal with if you know that it's coming, but that's if you know that it's coming.

This is a pattern that continues consistently throughout the game, but reaches an apotheosis at the end of Stage 5. The stage boss here is a little orb guy in a cart that moves horizontally along the top of the screen, shooting lasers down at you. To hit him, you have to bounce your star off of the top of the conveyor belt on the left, or fling it from the top of the conveyor belt down and hope that it bounces up the way that you want it to. The star, following the laws of physics, cannot bounce higher than its initial, highest bounce; essentially, you have one chance to hit the boss with a conveyor belt ricochet every time he comes near, and if you whiff, you have to wait for him to go all the way to the right and then all the way back to the left again. After he takes three hits, he fires his lasers even faster. The lasers also explode when they hit the ground, so your only option is to weave between them in mid-air. After he takes the fourth hit, he shoots the lasers so quickly that it is literally impossible to weave through them. If he takes the fourth hit too close to the left side of the screen, you won't be able to charge up your star fast enough to throw it, guaranteeing that you take damage. The fifth hit takes him out, at which point a second boss walks out from stage right to fire homing missiles and Contra spread shots at you. There is an unspeakable darkness within whoever designed this fight. A joyous mind cannot conjure these tortures.

The only part of the game harder than this is getting the Stage 4 secret item that lets you fight the true final boss, where you have one chance to jump off of your star (it has collision) and into an above alcove. If you miss it, you drop down onto a checkpoint, and you can't go back to try again. You can game over and continue to restart the entire level, but using a continue clears the remaining three secret items from the prior three stages out of your collection. You need six secret items in total — one from each level — to go to the true final stage. You either make that jump on your first attempt, or you have to start the entire game over from scratch. Again, I want to call this cruel. I don't know what word would better apply.

It's disappointing, because this is a game that I really would have liked to love. I think Yumetaro's design is so ridiculously over-the-top cute that it loops back around to being funny, and that endears me to him. I think the fact that Sunsoft were able to make all of these pieces fit together on hardware as rudimentary as the Famicom is admirable. I just wish the act of playing it didn't feel like pulling teeth.

Can I fuck 🥺

And I looked, and beheld a blue dragon: and his name that sat on him was Keil Fluge, and Rez followed with him.

Panzer Dragoon feels like a prototype of a lot of different games that came later, which I find to usually be the case for these landmark titles. This is far from an inherently bad thing, though; Panzer Dragoon predates Star Fox 64, and I imagine that the former will have more than a few unfair comparisons drawn to it by the latter by people who aren't aware of the date disparity. I know older, more foundational games tend to attract people who bring up that old Seinfeld Is Unfunny TVTropes page to talk about how a game has "aged", which is an incorrect assumption. That's because Seinfeld never stopped being funny. Yes, a lot of sitcoms drew from Seinfeld, but there's nothing they've done that has retroactively made Seinfeld look bad. Seinfeld is still funny. There was never a period where Seinfeld wasn't funny. And Panzer Dragoon, like Seinfeld, has always been good. I don't think there was ever a period where Panzer Dragoon was incredible, but the facets that it gets right haven't been rendered wrong by anything that's released in the intervening years.

What's here is a simple but entertaining game, leaning heavily on its arcade inspirations. As much of Panzer Dragoon's blueprints were used later by other games, it doesn't exist in a vacuum; Space Harrier and After Burner were both massive Sega titles that predated it, and it isn't difficult to spot the strands of their DNA sticking out from this. It's mechanically solid because it's mechanically simple. There's very little you can do to engage with the game beyond moving your reticle around and pressing the fire button. Again, though, it benefits from this simplicity; this is a game carried hard by its vibes, and it gets those across near-flawlessly. There are hints at a much bigger world than the small slice we see in the game proper, and the thumping music and crunchy models do an impressive job in carving out an aesthetic.

I find it difficult to write at length about Panzer Dragoon, because it’s a remarkably brief experience. I want to call it “thin”, but I think that carries a bit of a negative connotation. “Breezy” might be the better word. It’s over and done with in about forty-five minutes, and there’s very little to actually sink your teeth into; the narrative extends as far as “the bad guy is going to a tower, stop him”, and the gameplay itself is little more than a rudimentary shooting gallery where you blast away at whatever’s on screen at a given moment. The ability to shift perspectives and rotate the camera around yourself at least ensures that there’s never a moment where you’re doing nothing, but I struggle to imagine a world where these camera shifts happen automatically and it changes anything of real significance. These mechanics underlying the core gameplay of shooting and dodging (overwhelmingly more in favor of shooting than dodging) feel a bit underdeveloped. It would have been nice to see the perspective switching matter far more than just Stage 4, where you just swap to the closest view and never leave it for the duration of the level.

Katsuhiko Yamada was credited as one of two stage designers for this, and it’s completely unsurprising that he would later go on to be the sole game designer for Rez. The two games run in parallel to one another: both are short-form, third-person rail shooters; both have a “hold the button to unleash a lock-on barrage” mechanic; both feature a heavy focus on aesthetics over most else. Where Rez ultimately comes out on top, I feel, is in its execution. It runs better, it has a style I’m more partial to, and it seems significantly more realized as a holistic experience. Still, though, Rez has got the benefit of having released six years later and with Panzer Dragoon to build off of, and that makes me appreciate this more. Anyone who’s a friend of Rez is a friend of mine.

Hitting all of the face buttons at the same time just straight up kills you and I think that's funny.

Mostly the exact kind of teenage bullshit we need to be fostering.

Every now and then I get into a mood. There's this feeling that rises in my chest and makes me feel like an animal in a cage. I look at my backlog for something to play, and then I leaf through the Steam store, and then I pull up some list somewhere for some "hidden gems" on some console, and then I give up. I sit there anxious and twitchy as the ennui sets in. It falls around me like wet towels. There is only one possible cure; I need to play some shitty PS2 game that nobody has ever heard of.

Nightshade ended up being a pretty bad pick for that, because it turned out to be something like the eleventh game in the Shinobi series. It's just one of those sequels that doesn't use the original name anywhere. That hasn't stopped it from largely slipping into obscurity, though, especially in the west; I'd never heard so much as a word about it before I stumbled across it on a masterlist of PS2 exclusives, and all it gave me to go off of was a title. I went into Nightshade essentially as blind as I could have, with no foreknowledge nor expectations aside from the vague hope that it would be good. At the very least, I hoped it would be interesting.

Nightshade is occasionally good, and significantly more interesting than I'd expected.

The game opens strong. Hibana must have gone through about six or seven different costume designs in her head and decided to incorporate all of them at once; she's clad from head-to-toe in gleaming white latex, she's wearing red gloves with blades on the elbows, she's got insect carapace boots, she's got what is incredibly obviously a Kamen Rider headband that descends down and over her face to act as an augmented-reality visor, she's got mandibles on the sides of her mask, fishnet stitching holding the entire outfit together, and the requisite Shinobi scarf that's about as long as the Mason-Dixon line and which flows behind her like water when she runs. When each element is listed individually, you'd expect her to look like an overdesigned monster, but it actually all comes together shockingly well. She looks kind of like one of those "what if a Pokemon was actually a human" fan drawings, in a good way. I imagine that if she'd been a supporting character in Shinobi first — the Akane to a Ninja Gaiden, so to speak — fans would be clamoring for her to be in a lot more games than just this and Project X Zone 2.

While I won't try to pit two bad bitches against one another, it does need to be said that Bayonetta 2 ripped the opening level of Nightshade completely the fuck off. Slicing apart monsters on top of a fighter jet as it weaves between buildings and keeps your feet glued to the hull even as it flies in a path perpendicular to the streets below is something Kamiya should have gotten a smack on the wrist for. Nightshade nails it, though, and it flawlessly pulls off the sequence a full decade earlier; you're kicking away missiles, you're spinning sai blades and slashing through Hellspawn, you do battle with a robot ninja who ends up ascending to humanity after he gets continued exposure to a shard of the evil red blade that eats souls. The tate system returns from Shinobi, too: killing enemies in rapid succession grants you an exponentially increasing damage boost, and if you manage to kill all of the enemies on screen in a short enough timespan, you get a cutscene of Hibana executing them all at once. What they don't tell you is that this works on bosses. Bosses will summon adds, and building a sufficiently long tate off of the mooks will open up the chance for you to charge a long Stealth Attack that will instantly kill the boss and give you a unique cutscene if you do it before the tate combo drops. It rules. It fucking rules so hard. It's probably one of the best rewards for playing stylishly and smoothly I've seen in a long time. Once you find an opening, you can kill any boss in a single strike.

Regrettably, though, the levels between boss fights can't hold up to the same level of quality for very long. A lot of the early stages are predicated on clambering around on rooftops and running through dark city streets, and those are all fun and good. Later levels can't help but put bottomless pits fucking everywhere that will instantly kill you and send you back to your last checkpoint, and a thirty-minute level might have two or three checkpoints at best. Getting across these pits steadily starts relying on bouncing between enemies with very few platforms you can actually stand on, and the armored enemies can only be bounced off of with a kick. You can only kick once while in the air, for some reason, so throw out one kick just a bit too early and it's back to the last checkpoint for you. I eventually just gave up on fighting every enemy and settled on running past them when I could, instead. It's possible to be a little too annoying with what you're asking the player to do, and this steps a few toes over the line.

I do want to bring attention to the writing, though, because it’s wonderfully absurd. This is a game where your corrupt CO warns you over radio comms that "astral sensors are at Level 3", meaning that "there is a large-class Hellspawn nearby", and everything just keeps rolling along as though those are two regular sentences to say to a person. Hibana is on a revenge quest against her former master and the new side-piece he swapped her out for. She ends up rebelling against the orders of the Japanese government and the Nakatomi Conglomerate because she realizes that she's little more than a disposable pawn to them, fit only to reassemble and return the cursed sword Akujiki into their care. Every other sentence out of her mouth is “it’s not my day” or “it’s not your day” or “this really isn’t my day”, because the writers are trying to give her a cool catchphrase. It's the sort of heightened realism often found scribbled in the back of a teenager's math notebook and too-often derided when presented as art by the public due to being "juvenile" or "appealing to the lowest common denominator". I'd counter by saying that the biggest prestige video games on the market have been taking themselves a little too fucking seriously lately and could strongly benefit from reigning it in. This isn't a suggestion that we abandon all pretense and make everything a joke; rather that it's our idiosyncrasies which make us interesting, and to play it safe is to play it boring. You'll never embarrass yourself if you hide those strange little parts of you, but you'll never find anyone who likes you for your true self, either. How much of you are you willing to surrender to spare your precious ego?

Nightshade ultimately ends up stumbling too hard and too often in its second half for me to enthusiastically suggest that everyone play it, but it’s absolutely worth trying out. It’s nonsense, but it’s good nonsense. At the very least, it’s good for your soul to play something that’s just a little bit trash every now and then. It’s like sitting under a waterfall and meditating. Cleanse yourself of impurities by not holding games to a prestige industry writing standard that’s still lagging about twenty years behind shit that your dad would have watched on the SciFi channel at 3 PM on a Sunday.

This easily has one of the best soundtracks on the console.

Fake plastic Toads.

Have you ever seen the NileBlue video where he makes the world's purest cookie? It's a pretty entertaining watch, if you haven't seen it; essentially, it's a professional home chemist sourcing some incredibly expensive lab-grade materials in order to chemically synthesize a completely refined cookie. No contaminants, no adjustments to or from the recipe, no ingredients which haven't been first sourced and validated by a chain of scientists. It costs thousands of dollars, requires a fully-stocked laboratory environment, and only ends up producing a single cookie. But, by the end of the video, it's ready. They've got a cookie. A real, honest-to-God, chocolate chip cookie. It's been made in a lab rather than in a kitchen, but it's a cookie all the same. The chemist lifts it up and takes a bite. He chews, and chews, and then grimaces, setting it back down. He says the cookie is bad, and he doesn't know what went wrong.

New Super Mario Bros. U is that cookie.

The word of the day is "sterile", because it's the only thing you could possibly call New Super Mario Bros. U. It uses heat-blasted tools fresh from the autoclave because it's horrified that it might introduce an imperfection or accidentally open a new pathway for experimentation. It's a base template released as a finished project. It's math worksheets. Nothing has been done to make it interesting, because the director has mentally checked out. The newest additions are coins that are colored green rather than gold or red or blue, and a flower power-up that lets you shoot snowballs instead of fireballs. We aren't exactly inventing the wheel, here.

It's a remarkably uninteresting game. The music is some of the worst in the series, everything looks like shitty action figures, there are essentially zero unique power-ups or gimmicks to keep the gameplay fresh. You would hope, then, that the levels would be some great pure-platforming challenges with solid designs and interesting layouts. They aren't. The overwhelming majority of the levels in this are long platforms followed by instakill pits followed by long platforms. You run in a straight line, jump over the pit, run in a straight line, jump over another pit, and repeat until the level ends. Sometimes the pit is bottomless, and other times it's filled with poison, and other times it's filled with lava. Picking up frozen enemies requires a second button press rather than just holding down the run button the way that you do for koopa shells, for some reason. There was one level that was actually interesting, where everything was shaded to look like Starry Night, and it seems to be the only level that anyone actually remembers. I suppose there's also the level near the end which suddenly requires you to use tilt controls for the first time in seven worlds, but that one's more memorable in the sense that you've never forgotten the time that you really embarrassed yourself in school.

Mario as a franchise (the 2D department, at least) was clearly in need of a shake-up long before this came out. It's a stagnant pool, filled with bacteria and fly eggs, completely unfocused. Even New Super Mario Bros. 2 at least tried to do something interesting by flooding the screen with coins. What does this have? Really, what does it have? Some boring levels and no personality? The vastly superior Super Mario Bros. Wonder shares only one game designer and two level designers from New Super Mario Bros. U out of the respective nine and twelve members of each department for Wonder. I don't want to suggest that those who worked on New Super Mario Bros. U and found themselves ultimately replaced are talentless — many of them are currently doing far better work on other, non-Mario games — but I think it's obvious that they got complacent. This game feels like the product of bored minds. Something released purely by compulsion; "the console is drowning and we need a new Mario game, so just get one out in time for Christmas!"

This is an era of Mario that I'm very glad has been left behind. Hopefully it'll remain as little more than a Super Mario Maker template for interested fans to add four games worth of tools to in order to bolster it into something actually entertaining. Aside from that, it's best that we just forget about this and move on. This should have stayed trapped in the coffin that is the Wii U instead of getting a Switch re-release. I'm certain that the resources wasted on putting it out again could have been better used literally anywhere else in the company.

Baby Yoshi fucking rules.

Valve figures out how to make Half-Life 2 fun just in time to abandon it completely.

Coming hot off of the heels of Episode One, this time a full year late rather than just nine months, Episode 2 kicks off in much the same way as the last entry. Gordon is buried in rubble, has lost all of his weapons, and needs to wait patiently while Alyx stands around saying proper nouns to him. There's a Portal Storm happening, much like The First Days, she warns. I begin to worry that the writing is starting as it'll mean to go on. My concerns are not at all alleviated by the one of the comic relief duo yelling "be adequate!" to Gordon Freeman as he leaves the area, excusing himself with the line "it sounds like something the Vorts would say". My grip tightens as I prepare for a Vortigaunt to later repeat the line back to me, because Erik Wolpaw heard what a brick joke was once and figured here would be a good place to practice them.

Fortunately, though, none of that comes to pass, and Episode 2 winds up being legitimately good in its second half. Far too much time is spent early on roaming around antilion caves while a Vortigaunt quips at you — there's one moment where he points out a burnt corpse on a chair as a wonderful piece of environmental storytelling in what I hope is a joke scene — and the caves themselves drag. I think I've come to the conclusion that the antlions just aren't an interesting enemy to fight. In practice, they don't end up doing much besides being bigger headcrabs. They leap at you, they swipe at you, the poison ones drop your health to one before the antidote kicks in and starts healing you back up. The only real difference is that they're not allowed to stand next to the thumpers, so you can just park next to one of those whenever it's around and start sniping without any fear of retribution.

Much better than the antlions are the hunters, who pull the double duty of both having an interesting design and being fun to fight. They're initially sold as being these horrible, brutal predators that'll tear anyone apart on sight, but they're not that hard to kill. Still, they can take a lot of bullets, and they're hard to track because they can climb and scuttle just about anywhere. At one point, I was backed into a bathroom that I couldn't get out of because one hunter blocked the exit while the other fired exploding flechettes into the tub next to me. I felt something click. These things would be dangerous if I wasn't wearing power armor. If Gordon was just an average citizen, the hunters would have shredded him. I haven't felt that way about a video game enemy in a long time, where there was such a clear synthesis of the horror stories told about them and the way that they moved and fought in-game. They're a very, very clear standout, and they're probably the most interesting hostile that Valve have ever designed.

Striders are less impressive, but I really liked the final setpiece where they teamed up with the hunters in their assault on White Forest. I’ve seen fans go both ways on this, with some hating the sequence and others loving it, and I definitely fall into the “loving it” camp. The striders are practically immune to everything besides Magnusson devices — you can kill them with rockets, but it takes a lot of rockets — and the hunters are so spongey that it’s hard to destroy them all quickly enough. You have to prioritize killing the hunters above all else, since they shoot the Magnusson devices off of the striders, and there’s not enough time to try racing them to see whether you can get the kill before they swat it off of their strider buddies. It’s a remarkably solved loop. Use explosives to kill the hunters, then use the Magnusson devices to kill the striders. It’s the exact kind of prescriptive gameplay I usually despise in shooters, where there’s really only one correct solution to the problem, but something about it works for me here. It’s a very tense resource drain, so you’re never able to operate at peak efficiency; by the end of it, I was down to two pulse rifle alt-fires and a magazine of pistol ammo to take out two hunters and a strider, and just barely managed to eke out a win. It was directed phenomenally.

Of course, it’s all also the last we’ll ever get of Half-Life 2. I’ll be fifty and people will still hold out hope that Valve is going to come back to finish the story. Historians in the far future will look back at the gilded tomb of Gabe Newell and still be wondering amongst themselves when Episode 3 is dropping. The light of the last stars will dim and the universe will grow cold and empty and in the sweeping black of space some wisps of fragmented consciousness will ask the darkness what the Borealis section would have been like, and the darkness will whisper back that it ‘s gonna be super fucking sick once it’s done. Don’t let Half-Life: Alyx fool you; the franchise is only going to be making lateral and backwards moves from here on out, and that’s if it can get another game at all.

Gordon’s car looks like complete shit and I’d appreciate it if the other characters stopped pretending it was cool to spare his feelings.

Wow, look! Nothing!

I’ve never really liked Half-Life 2 — maybe I’ll get into that in a later post — so I didn’t expect much from the episodes. They’ve always remained as the bailey to the motte for a lot of fans, I’ve noticed, who I’ve told I didn’t like Half-Life 2. The episodes are where Half-Life 2 really gets good, they’ve told me. Of course, I’ve been told in equal measure that the episodes are where Half-Life 2 gets bad, and that’s the exact kind of fandom splitter that makes my ears perk up. Not liking something and then hearing that the sequel to it is both loved and reviled by the original fans may as well be the recipe to getting me to immediately buy a game. Besides, they’re only a dollar each, and they come with Deathmatch. They come with Lost Coast, too, but, you know, they come with Deathmatch.

And Episode One is kind of boring.

So little actually happens! Episode One, broadly speaking, is a rehash of the citadel section of Half-Life 2, a singular “wait for the elevator” section, and then about two city blocks of walking in a straight line before you do an escort mission. Valve was seriously crunching to get this out in time, and they still ended up missing their projected release date by nearly a full year. I have no idea how or why they thought they were going to be able to publish a new episode every three months. Even with all of the reused assets and an existing storyline to continue off of, expecting your developers and designers to be able to drop two hours of a playable game every ninety days is ridiculous. With such an inherently silly backing concept, it's a bit of a miracle that the two episodes ended up releasing at all.

Actually playing it is a bit of a hassle. I really didn't care for the constant "stop what you're doing to stand around while characters talk at you" interruptions in Half-Life 2, because you could usually at least skip traditional cutscenes. Episode One spends a lot of time in its earliest stages asking you to patiently wait while characters have revelations next to you. Stand around while Alex figures out how to get you across a gap, stand around while Alex hacks a door and admires the scenery, hang around while Alex downloads some data off of the Combine mainframe. The actual combat offers some clever setpieces, at least — letting you go wild with the empowered gravity gun again, some incredibly dark areas littered with zombies, Combine fights on long, open streets where you get supported by rebels on the rooftops — but it takes a long time before those get going, and each of those has an equal and opposite "finagle cars on top of antlion hills" section.

Episode One is written kind of annoyingly. A friend of mine blames Erik Wolpaw for this, and I suppose that makes sense; I think the strongest facet of Half-Life 2 is unarguably its aesthetic, followed closely behind by its writing. I’ve never loved how reliant on lore and supplementary materials Half-Life 2 is for getting any context into any of what’s going on, but I respect it. I think it’s a pretty interesting and bold idea to throw just about everything from the beloved original out in favor of starting from a blank slate with the sequel. Episode One, by contrast, starts about two seconds after the ending of Half-Life 2, and largely plays everything straight from there. In itself, I can't find a problem with the overarching plot. I don’t, however, care for the characters.

There’s something very infantilizing about the way characters talk to Gordon in this, especially Alyx. I don’t know if she thinks Gordon hit his head or something, but the talks to him the way that she talks to Dog. You open a grate cover or do a puzzle about as complicated as fitting wood blocks into shaped holes and she drops everything to cheer you on. “You’re so smart, Gordon. You’re such a smart guy. I love smart guys. Smart guys are the best. You’re such a smart, smart boy.” Enough! I know we’re writing with the intent to appeal to people who unironically called the last game “the thinking man’s FPS”, but this is too much. The whole “zombine” bit is also so obviously written with the intent to become a meme, which is a trend that continues well into Episode Two. Given what Wolpaw has written since, I think blaming him may actually be a fair assessment.

Exit 17 is an incredibly underwhelming end to an already unimpressive episode. It's not hard to imagine the dev team huddled around a table late into the night, desperately trying to figure out how to end the game, and then someone yells "fuck it, make them do the same escort quest five times". Five times. With some minor changes to the route, mind, but five times all the same. A door gets blown open, an exit gets blocked, mines get dropped. I can appreciate them attempting to use every part of the animal, so to speak, but there really just isn't enough to go around. The entire level is one small parking lot and a warehouse roughly the same size as the parking lot. The Combine barely even make an effort to stop you. They put two guys in through the top window and assume that they won't both get immediately gibbed by Gordon Freeman. The whole section is like trying to feed a family of five with a single potato. Sure, you can divide it five ways, but all that's gonna accomplish is keeping everyone hungry. Either you need to get more potatoes, or you need to limit the number of people you're feeding. You can't have it both ways. If your only goal is to make the game last longer, you may as well just put the player in front of a locked door that won't open until fifteen real-world minutes have passed.

It's certainly not bad, and I imagine that it being shorter than Forrest Gump is pulling a lot of weight in making me not dislike it. It's okay. There's ultimately so little here that it's impossible to really love it or hate it, and that might be the strongest condemnation of all.

Thank goodness Valve got all of those vehicle sections out of their system, so I definitely won't have to worry about them in Episode 2!

Lowering the bar.

Black Mesa is a fan remake-cum-reimagining of Half-Life, and it shows. It’s a very technically impressive game, extracting just about everything it can possibly wring out of the damp towel that is the Source engine. It’s a fairly well-designed game, by virtue of most of its elements being copied over wholesale from the original Half-Life. It’s obviously made by people who are very, very passionate about Valve’s work. But Black Mesa forgets, omits, or changes enough of what worked before that it ultimately commits the mortal and unforgivable sin of making Half-Life kind of boring, a crime for which it must be punished by making it boil upside-down beneath the lake of ice for all eternity.

I like Half-Life a lot. I hardly love playing Half-Life, but it’s a game that I both enjoy and respect, which is a sadly uncommon combination. I’ve never existed in a world without Half-Life, a statement which I’m hoping will make some of you wither into dust, and that makes it a bit difficult to personally gauge the impact it had. Obviously, there are hundreds upon hundreds of reports detailing exactly what made Half-Life so special. There are articles and videos and commentary tracks all recounting all of the little quirks and nuances that later shooters silently adopted because it was what they were expected to do now. I can appreciate it from a sort-of dispassionate, outside perspective; as far as I can tell, shooters before Half-Life were mostly just copying Doom’s homework, for better and for worse. If nothing else, you can absolutely tell that a big shift to a more cinematic style was emerging with Half-Life — again, for better and for worse.

Regardless of the finer details, Half-Life is now a very old game. Twenty-five years old, in fact. And the neat thing about games that get that old is that it inherently primes people for a remake. “The gameplay needs an update”, “the graphics look bad”, “fix Xen”, the masses say. It’s a mentality you have for toys. Make it shiny, make it new, make it talk when you pull the string on its back, make sure you add lens flares and ray tracing. It’s certainly nothing that Half-Life needs. Half-Life is already an incredibly solid game that had a fierce impact on the industry and near single-handedly made Valve the monolith that it is today. To suggest that Half-Life — just about any game, really — needs a remake is to fundamentally assign this toy mentality to art.

But, hell, a remake could still be cool.

I like Half-Life, and Crowbar Collective likes Half-Life, and a lot of other people all really like Half-Life. Besides, the game has already been made for them. If all they’re doing is porting it from GoldSrc to Source, what’s the worst that could happen?

We ultimately don’t know the worst case scenario, because it never came to pass. We do, however, know of a pretty rough scenario, which is Black Mesa releasing in the state that it’s in.

The initial few levels are actually very impressive, largely because of how close they play to the original. The tram ride is there, the resonance cascade is there, the brutal ammo restrictions and tight corridors filled with headcrabs and zombies are still there. Hell, even your first encounters with the aliens are tense and unforgiving, encouraging you to use flares to light enemies on fire in order to conserve your ammo. It’s neat! All the way from the start of Anomalous Materials to the end of Office Complex, Black Mesa feels remarkably like Half-Life fully realized. It’s all shiny and pretty, you’ve got some mechanics to play with that were originally intended but didn’t make it to the final release, and it’s a very enjoyable time. You can even forgive Crowbar Collective for getting rid of the scientist who dives through the window and says “greetings”.

And then We’ve Got Hostiles starts.

The HECU still look like they’re holding MP5s and pistols, but they’re secretly wielding Freeman-seeking laser beams. There’s no longer an ounce of hesitation on their part; if they see a hair on your head poking out from cover, they’re shooting you, and you’re taking damage. They’re like Blood cultists in body armor. Also in keeping with pre-Half-Life design decisions, their AI has been drastically dumbed down. The HECU will still at least try to flank you, but they no longer seem all that interested in the concept of their own survival. They’ll rush you down open corridors with no cover, seemingly only interested in getting as in your face as they possibly can, regardless of whether they’re holding an SMG or a shotgun. Throwing a grenade at their feet will make them loudly announce that there’s a nearby grenade, but they don’t ever seem to actually try getting away from it. They’ll do the little Source Engine shuffle that the Combine like to do — if you’ve played enough Half-Life 2, you know exactly what I’m referring to — and then blow up. This is in obvious and stark contrast to the HECU in Half-Life who, while hardly all the avatars of John Rambo, at least seemed like they weren’t showing up just to die. Combat in Black Mesa against the Marines largely just boils down to you and a grunt sprinting at one another with the fire button held down and you winning the war of attrition by virtue of being the only guy here with power armor. Compared to the earlier, more impactful Black Mesa fights against Vortigaunts and houndeyes, this is a letdown; compared to the HECU in the original, it’s shocking.

Given how frequently you enter skirmishes with the Marines, it's something you really can't ever get away from for the overwhelming majority of the game. Crowbar Collective mentioned that their goal was to "make combat more intense", and it seems as though they've tried to do that simply by flooding rooms with significantly more enemies. By my count, Half-Life's We've Got Hostiles pits you against 21 HECU; Black Mesa sends out 32. It doesn't sound like much, and it isn't at first, but it starts to add up fast. Someone on Reddit actually went through and counted every single on-screen HECU kill, and it comes out to over 550 in Black Mesa compared to Half-Life's 250. When you also take into consideration the fact that pre-Xen levels are condensed compared to the original (with On A Rail being noticeably cut way down), the enemy density is completely out of control.

It's not just that there are more of them now, either. The HECU take roughly the same amount of bullets to put down (about 60 health in Black Mesa relative to the original 80), and your ammo is even tighter than it used to be. Being able to carry 250 SMG bullets with ten grenade rounds on the alt-fire was a bit too freeing and a bit too fun, so now you're hard-capped at 150 SMG bullets and three grenade rounds. The pistol now only holds 150 rounds, instead of 250. The shotgun now holds 64 shells instead of 125. The enemy AI is somehow stupider than the one from twenty-five years ago, so it's not like the game has been made any more difficult now that Gordon's got the HEV suit without pockets; holding the MP5 at head height and clicking from a distance seems to do most of the work for you, and the HECU drop about as much SMG ammo as it takes to kill them. The optimal strategy, it seems, is to just hang back and fish for damage multiplier headshots with the MP5 and then go to the next slaughtermap room to continue the process for the next seven hours until Xen.

While Half-Life's Xen was the end product of tightening deadlines and dwindling budgets, Black Mesa's Xen exists almost as a complete refutation of the original's design circumstances; it very obviously got an overwhelming amount of development time and assets and takes up nearly a third of the new game, whereas the previous Xen was over and done with in about twenty minutes. I think Xen is where Black Mesa most obviously becomes a fan game, because it's clear that nobody in charge ever felt the need to say "no" to anything. It's incredibly long, packed to the gills with scripted setpieces and references to later Half-Life titles, and it keeps using the same wire connecting puzzles and conveyor belt rides over and over again in the hopes that making Xen longer will make Xen better. There's a section here in Interloper where you have to bounce off of one of three spring platforms to kill a Controller, and then that opens a path for you to destroy a fleshy glob maintaining a force field. You would think that the fact that this is split into three very distinct paths would mean that you would thus have three very distinct encounters, but they all play almost identically to one another. All three of them are circular rooms with a Controller floating around, and you break his crystals in order to make him vulnerable to your attacks. It isn't a difficult fight, and it isn't a complicated puzzle, and ultimately just winds up being the exact same thing three times in a row. This happens constantly throughout Interloper, which mostly consists of you sprinting down long conveyor belts and then jumping off of them onto other conveyor belts for about two straight hours.

What burns me most about Black Mesa's Xen, however, is that the entire borderworld has had the personality sucked straight out of it. Xen used to be a Giger-esque hellscape, all bone and speckled carapace. A lot of the level geometry textures were taken straight from reference photos of insects, and it did a great job selling Xen as something of a hive; lots of gross, fleshy, chitinous pockets carved into the walls, pale white and red moving parts that are clearly both artificial and organic. It makes sense, contextually, because the Nihilanth is itself a hybrid of flesh and metal, and the home that it's made of Xen is reflected in its design. Black Mesa's Xen, in its deepest parts, is way more heavy on the machinery angle than the organic one. Through the thick, red haze, it's hard to tell what you're even looking at. The glowing blue lights leading you by the nose sit next to what are very clearly just steel girders and pistons, which is immensely boring when you compare it to the almost-living Xen from two and a half decades ago.

Old Xen's inspirations were obvious, but it still managed to carve an identity out of them. Black Mesa's Xen, on the other hand, looks like fucking everything else.

I want you to look at these two pictures and tell me that they don't look like they were from the same game. I want you to look at this screenshot and tell me that you can't picture the SSV Normandy flying straight through it. I want you to look at this image and tell me that it doesn't look like a Destiny raid map. Whatever identity Xen once had is gone, stripped bare to make it completely indistinct from any photobashed ArtStation "outer space" drawing to be used for padding out a portfolio and nothing else. Originality is both overrated and unimportant, but when you throw out something neat in favor of something bland, I'm going to be hard on it. Gordon Freeman crawls grunting to his feet after going through the Lambda Core teleporter and walks through blue bio-luminescent plants until he sees the Eye of Sauron looking down on him and a woman starts singing over baby's first synthwave.

On that note, Black Mesa has entered itself into the club of Media that Needs to Shut the Fuck Up, given how it starts playing some pretty mediocre tunes from the word go and never ever stops. Music is playing constantly throughout the game, never giving you a single quiet moment or a chance to drink in the layered soundscapes, and it hardly even has the decency to be good most of the time. For every decent pull that fits the action, there are two tracks that clash so hard that they spoil the scene they're in. Blast Pit 3 plays during the sequence in Blast Pit where you have to sneak past the tentacles back up through the missile silo. The incredibly loud, chugging guitars that lead into the How to Compose Dramatic Music For Film tinkling piano keys don't fit the sequence at all. Again and again, these amateurish tracks keep leaching into the game like pesticides into groundwater. The intro to Lambda Core where you uneventfully ride a freight elevator for two minutes is punctuated by steel drums and pounding synths in a moment that should be quiet and introspective; Blast Pit 1 legitimately sounds like a recording of somebody warming up before their actual performance; every single track on Xen inevitably leads into the exact same fucking ethereal female vocals "ooh"ing and "aah"ing over the instrumentation. It wasn't enough for Xen to look like everything else on the market, so all of its songs sound identical to one another, too. It's rough. It's so clearly a collection of just about every thought the composer has ever had in the past two decades, all strung together end to end without much of any consideration as to when it ought to be playing or what ought to even make it into the final game. I can't remember the last time that a game's music annoyed me this much.

Peel away the layers and poke your fingers through the flesh, and Half-Life is still at the core of Black Mesa. Enough of it is still present that playing Black Mesa isn't a completely miserable experience. All it managed to make me feel, however, was that I'd rather just be playing the original instead. Black Mesa can't manage to be anything more than a slipshod imitation of Half-Life, and the moments that it does well are the moments that Valve already did better twenty-five years ago.

Xen was never bad.

Huh?

Way back when I was still in the target audience for Kingdom Hearts, I thought Kingdom Hearts was the stupidest thing I had ever seen. This wasn't because I was some supreme arbiter of taste at the age of eight — my favorite game at the time was Shadow the Hedgehog, if you need further clarification — but it was an initial conception that never really left me. While a lot of the media that I had dismissed as a child tended to seem a lot more favorable once I grew up and started developing a taste of my own, I've always thought of Kingdom Hearts as being this woefully lame and eternally bad series that was beloved only by children and Disney adults who had played it as children. Grown adults who liked it only did so because they'd never reached an understanding of the idea that something you liked as a kid doesn't need to be something you still like as an adult. But that's an unfair assumption. After all, there are a lot of people I respect who have said that there's something about this game that got to them. Elements that they loved, gameplay they adored, story beats that brought them to tears. There's something about Kingdom Hearts that has managed to hook people, and, as I said in my 2023 year-end list, we owe it to ourselves to get out of our comfort zones and play things we'd never otherwise think to play if we ever want to take ourselves seriously. If I continued to dismiss Kingdom Hearts out of hand because I decided that it looked stupid twenty years ago, then I'm no better now than I was when I was in the third grade. It's only fair — only right — that I investigate it for myself.

I hate Kingdom Hearts.

Either I'm just unable to see the mastery hidden behind Kingdom Hearts that everyone else is, or I'm the only sane man in the madhouse. It hardly matters which one is the actual truth, because the outcome is the same: a lot of people like Kingdom Hearts, the ones that don't like it don't seem to despise it, and I can't fucking stand it. I'm the odd man out.

This camera is atrocious. Controlling it with the L2 and R2 buttons is bad enough when we live in a world where the right stick is purely just a second D-pad, but the lock-on acts as more of a gentle suggestion. It simultaneously has very little interest in actually tracking enemies that move off-screen while also swinging around so violently that it's difficult to keep track of where anything is. Enemies seem to wait until they're off-screen to attack, which certainly makes sense for them, but is incredibly frustrating when you eat a fireball to the back of the head that you literally could not see coming nor tech even if you did. The camera is also a physical object that can't pass through terrain, which means that it's constantly smashing against walls and giving you completely worthless angles the second you enter a hallway that's just a bit too tight. It does everything wrong.

I also found the combat to be a complete mash-fest, largely just focused on getting directly in front of an enemy's face and spamming the attack button as fast as I humanly could. Hopping into the air for a moment before spamming the attack button seemed to make Sora hit things faster, so that wound up becoming a core part of the rotation. Not helping matters is how obscenely delayed most of Sora's kit actually is, with a dishonorable mention going specifically to his jump; there's what feels like a half-second of delay before he actually becomes airborne after you hit the button, which is bad in combat sections and unforgivable in the parts where you need to platform. There's a jump over a couple of mushrooms in the Alice in Wonderland world long before you get the high jump or the glide, and combined with the terrible camera was probably the single most difficult challenge in the entire game. I nearly burst a blood vessel when I found out that your partners have collision and can push you off of edges if you aren't careful. In some areas, this only means needing to hop back up to where you just were. In others, it means needing to transition through several different loading zones as you slowly climb your way back up.

It is a very pretty game, though, both graphically and sonically. Certainly moreso the former than the latter; this might have the single worst rendition of Night on Bald Mountain I will ever hear in my life. It's not hard to look at this and be impressed, especially in the original areas; the final set piece is an absolute treat, with you fighting waves of Heartless in a pitch-black room and only being able to tell where they are by the glow of their eyes. There are a lot of visual elements here that I know get expanded upon in Kingdom Hearts 2, and I think it was pretty smart of the team to keep going further down that path.

For as much shit as people talk about the narrative, I thought it was far and away the strongest thing Kingdom Hearts had going for it. Not the bulk of it, though; the overwhelming majority of the game is spent traipsing through abridged recaps of Disney movies, primarily the more middling ones that the Walt Disney Company presumably weren't all that protective of. Like, Hercules isn't a good film just because you and I and everyone else want Meg to look at us like we're living pieces of trash. Even still, Kingdom Hearts breezes right through a significant amount of plot beats, largely resulting in more of a Disney-World-tour sensation rather than one of occupying an actual world. You're going through the theme park version of these different films and getting the Cliff's Notes of just enough plot to give you an idea of what you're meant to be doing. Characters in the Disney worlds act less like characters and more as mascots. They're wildly flat and underdeveloped caricatures. No, the interesting parts of the Kingdom Hearts narrative are the parts that are wholly original to it.

I actually really like the story that Riku and Sora have got going on here, with Kairi mostly taking a backseat until the final couple hours of the game. People have spoken a lot about some of the gay subtext, and I think it's largely difficult to miss — Riku offering a fruit to Sora with the prompt that sharing it will bind their two souls together for eternity may as well have been delivered while he was on one knee — while still being pretty interesting. Sora is probably the worst fucking friend ever. I get that he thinks of Riku as more of a rival than a buddy, but he only responds to Riku openly lamenting how inadequate and lonely he feels with either literal silence or general disinterest. It's hardly a surprise that he ends up falling to the darkness when he's gotten rebuked at literally every single turn, all the while being manipulated further into thinking he has no other choice. It's neat, and it comes to a nice close when Riku manages to break free of Ansem's control and his own insecurities to help Sora close the door to Kingdom Hearts. Regrettably, he is also forced to share the conclusion of his arc with fucking Mickey Mouse.

Kingdom Hearts has an interesting story running through it, but, again, it's constantly being silenced by the game interrupting itself to say "holy shit, you're in Aladdin world". I don't fucking care about Aladdin. I've seen Aladdin. Aladdin is a fine movie that's significantly more interesting and better written as a movie, and not as this shitty pastiche with Dan Castellaneta doing Homer voice while trying to fill Robin Williams's shoes. God, so many of these actors just aren't doing a good job. It's kind of impressive that the child actors fucking crush it, and not even by comparison; Haley Joel Osment just kills it. Billy Zane's Ansem is pretty solid, as is Mandy Moore's Aerith. The rest I'm ambivalent about, or actively hostile towards. Brian Blessed sounds fucking terrible in this.

I did have a moment while I was playing Kingdom Hearts, right near the end when I was climbing back up to the top of Hollow Bastion. I had the realization that my keyblade looked like a flower. I was mostly just equipping whatever had the best stats, and it just happened to be that the Divine Rose gave me exactly what I needed. It very suddenly occurred to me, at that moment, that I never would have been using it if I had played this when I was a kid. Flowers are for girls, after all. Even if it meant equipping a strictly worse weapon that didn't do what I wanted it to do — one that actively harmed my build, even — I wouldn't have equipped the flower keyblade.

I was a bit of a fruity kid growing up. I wanted to wear nail polish, I liked watching a lot of shows for girls, I didn't really feel the revulsion that a lot of other people seemed to feel at doing things that weren't "for" their gender. Of course, it all kind of ended up making sense once I realized I liked dudes, but it was a pretty strange feeling to have while growing up when I wasn't really allowed to correctly guess the reasoning behind it. My dad made every effort to beat all of that out of me. To mold me into a Man. I think I gravitated more to a lot of these hyper-edgy pieces of media like Shadow the Hedgehog and whatever garbage aired on Spike TV in the hopes that it would impress him. Obviously, this was more than a little misguided. He would have been a lot happier had I picked up a football helmet and a drill and a cigar and acted like what people thought men were supposed to be in the 1950s, but I figured it was worth trying. It wasn't. When you're not allowed to be the person you are, you tend to do a pretty bad job of acting like the person you're expected to be. The flower keyblade was for girls, and that meant the flower keyblade was justification to be punished if I used it. Today, I equipped the flower keyblade and used it all the way until the end.

There's a part of me I lost a long time ago that's made it impossible for me to like Kingdom Hearts.

I don't know if it was a childhood whimsy that allowed me to see the good in anything, or if it was a childish naivety that allowed me to see anything as good.

If you only play Jack's game once, you know that it's a 7/10. If you play it twice, you know that it's one of the greatest character action games ever made.

I mostly play games to the credits, and then I stop. My reasoning for this is that if I see the credits of any given work, then the creator is signaling to me that the work is now over. It's a pretty good system, largely because creators seem to be on the same page as me; the most they'll usually include is something like a post-credits scene, or maybe a New Game Plus option if they're feeling especially daring. Stranger of Paradise offers a post-game with a decent wealth of side missions to take on, but I never felt any real need to dig into them. I saw credits, after all. The game was over, and everything after this was just a bonus for those who desperately needed more and didn't feel like starting a new run from scratch. I imagine that this is how most people experienced Stranger of Paradise, and I similarly imagine that this is why most people seem to agree that Stranger of Paradise is good. Not great, not awful, just good.

Stranger of Paradise doesn't do a good enough job at incentivizing you to use even a quarter of the tools you have available until the DLCs, which I think is a shame. You can easily cruise through the entire base game with any job on Hard by hitting the Optimize Equipment button every now and then. There's really very little that you need to do to roll credits. I suppose it's good for encouraging the player to learn their fundamentals — blocking, dodging, parrying, learning when it's safe to hit and when you need to back off — but I don't see much of a reason why they're given the entire length of the base game to do it. Stranger of Paradise certainly doesn't start when you get into the DLC, but it opens up so much when you do that you may as well be playing a completely different game.

Suddenly everything matters. Everything. Gear now requires you to balance affinities and blessings and attached skills rather than just picking whatever has the highest level appended to hit. The smithy becomes something that you actually use, forcing you to swap affinities and skills around while upgrading the gear that you've got to be better at everything it does. Figuring out a command ability rotation you can bust out during fights to keep your buffs going is critical. You get three Lightbringer forms instead of just one, and you need to be making regular use of them to beat the highest-tier enemies. Job levels get capped at 300 up from 30, and each level beyond 30 gives you a master point that you can allocate into extra stats to create a myriad of different builds even within the same job. The game stops playing fair, and it similarly demands that you stop playing fair. You will struggle, wonder how the fuck anyone is ever supposed to do whatever is walling you, figure out that the trick is based on some mechanic that you haven't been making use of until this point, develop an understanding of that mechanic, and then use it to win. You repeat this until Jack becomes an unstoppable beast and you break the balance in half over your knee, and the game immediately ends with a message of congratulations.

Stranger of Paradise might be the mechanically deepest character action game I've ever played, but it rolls out all of its mechanics masterfully over the course of the base game and its three DLCs. You never really stop learning until the end of the third expansion, but it never feels overwhelming. Struggling with the Dragon Trials? Learn how to balance affinities and allocate your job's side-upgrades. Struggling in the rift? Learn how to play around with the smithy's tools and identify relic gear. Struggling against the final boss of the rift? Learn how to use Dimension Bringer. Struggling in the final zone? Learn how to work blessings into your build. I didn't even know that you could parry until about fifteen hours in, but it eventually became the cornerstone of my entire final setup.

I said it earlier in my review for Sekiro, but you can boil most action games down to one of either slow or fast, and one of either simple or complex. Fast and simple is my least favorite combination. Fast and complex is my most. Stranger of Paradise is kind of fast and ridiculously complex, and is accordingly one of the best action games I've ever experienced. Rare is it to find a game that's as fun to play as it is to break. Your reward for struggling through the past thirty hours of the game is to attain borderline godhood just in time for it to end (provided that you didn't use Extra Mode to cheat your way through most of it), and it's a wonderful capstone to a delightful playthrough.

Of course, the gameplay is far from the only thing that managed to slip its hooks into me. The fact that I can describe the narrative as "a post-modern take on how nostalgia shapes our memories as viewed through the lens of Final Fantasy setpieces" and not be incorrect is ridiculous. This is the killing Chaos game! This is the bullshit game! This is the game where Jack turns on his iPod and plays nu-metal and then walks away! How the fuck is this serious? How can you describe it as anything other than blunted edge, more resembling Shadow the Hedgehog than Paradise Lost?

The key here is intention. Jack is a completely one-dimensional edgelord. However, he wasn't always that way; it's only by seeing everything through to the end that you get to see the full picture of who Jack really is — who he used to be, at least — before he gave himself completely over to his quest for revenge. There's something about your first playthrough that'll make you feel like the writing is bad, because it plays into a lot of very basic, newbie pitfalls; everyone always talks as if they know exactly what's going on, leaving the player feeling mostly bewildered at every development. Everyone seems to know something that you don't, which makes all of the characters have this sort-of alien quality to them that you often see in stories that are poorly-written. However, that's exactly the point. Everyone else in your party knows exactly what's going on, and, as the player avatar, he's about as confused about all of this shit as you are. It's only by the time the game ends that you're filled in on all of the details, and it largely feels like an asspull the first time you play it through. Go through the game a second time with the knowledge that you now have, and a lot of what seemed like bad writing from the outset reveals itself to be secretly masterful all along. You and Jack just didn't know it yet.

It's remarkable that Stranger of Paradise has as much to say as it does, while never managing to get in its own way. Many players will breeze through it, never engage with the deeper narrative hooks — why would they, right? — and walk away feeling as though they got a pretty decent experience. In a way, that's admirable. Stranger of Paradise doesn't grab you by the shoulders and scream in your face that you need to equip this job with this gearset for this boss to understand this plot thread to appreciate this bit of story. It gives you a lot of leniency to overlook all of that in a way that makes me feel bad for not playing closer attention to it on my first time through. I feel like I've failed Stranger of Paradise, in a way, and this is the best way for me to make things up to it.

If you've only played it once, I don't have strong enough words to beg you to play it a second time. Take what you know, everything you've learned your first time through, and bring it with you again. Re-enter the cycle, just as Jack has done hundreds of times over, and realize why the Lufenians felt it so important to make sure you don't get to keep your memories when you start over. It's because your knowledge will make you more powerful that anyone could have expected.

I don't give a fuck who you are.