The worst thing the internet ever did to me way back when was selling me on the idea of Dark Souls as this SUPER HARD GAMER series for GAMERS! GIT GUD and PREPARE TO DIE! When in reality it’s this really offbeat and interesting interpretation of an RPG where even though it’s entirely skill-based, and it can be pretty hard, there’s still more than enough to form personal attachments with outside of the gameplay itself. It’s very light on narrative but fosters mechanical storytelling through its nonlinearity and some of its wonkier mechanics. Getting cursed in Depths and having to climb my way out, having my weapon nearly break halfway through a bossfight and having to swap around on the fly; two emergent situations that aren’t really all that significant, but were memorable enough to hold onto and help my playthroughs feel ‘mine’. Working towards the Dragonslayer Spear only to realise I just transformed my only good weapon into something I’m 10(!!) levels away from being able to use would probably come off as cheap in any other game, but I found myself eager to work around this sudden frustrating wrench in my build when the whole game builds itself around putting you in uncomfortable situations and telling you to deal with it.

It’s a vibes game to me, really. It’s hard for me to imagine there’s many of that GIT GUD crowd still grinding out DS1 when games like DS3, Sekiro and Elden Ring exist because it just doesn’t offer the same mechanical depth or extreme upper limit of challenge compared to them, and it only gets easier when you realise you can deal with most of the enemies in the game by circle strafing and backstabbing where possible. But that’s not the point, right? It’s more than just a set of challenges, it’s a world to be explored and overcome. Combat encounters aren’t just enemies to be killed and walked past; they’re part of the world they live in, to transform threatening environments into dangerous ones and communicate the hostility of the world. “Easy” sections lighter on combat allow themselves to exist in order to punctuate the danger for feelings of peace, introspection, foreboding; Kiln of the First Flame, Lost Izalith, the empty space in Anor Londo. Challenge is part of the aesthetic, but it’s not *the* aesthetic.

Something I noticed even when I was playing DS3 as my first Souls game, and have only grown more vindicated on as I’ve gone back, is that the slow combat is much better to emphasise the games’ stellar visual design than the faster-paced lean the newer games have taken. Taking DS3 as the example, most combat encounters with anything too much harder than basic Hollows take a lot of focus to the point where it’s hard to take in anything that’s around me until they’re done, and in bossfights I’m spending too much focus on the attack cues to focus on really anything else. Not that DS1 doesn’t take focus, but there’s enough downtime *during* combat to take in everything else; to focus in on bossfights, there’s only one fight in DS3 - Gael - who I’ve been able to appreciate for anything except for the kinetic feel, whereas one of my favourites in DS1, being Gaping Dragon, I love for practically everything *but* the gameplay.

It’s probably not that surprising from this to hear that I have more of a strained relationship with From’s later titles, but this game really hits such a good blend of atmospheric exploration and slow and simple yet punishing combat that I just can’t get enough of, even when it’s not putting its best foot forwards. Anyway I can’t wait for King’s Field to beat my ass

(For personal reasons, I've decided against marking these types of impressions as reviews in the future. If you want to see more of them, be sure to check out the list I'm compiling of each.)

More fascinating as a byzantine reflection of mid-to-late 2000s internet culture through the proxy of jokes that you had to "be there to get" than as a game itself, which means one of two things: you were either "there," or you're watching someone else suffer through the entire thing because Adobe Flash died years ago. Understood as a game that you watch people get mad at, there really isn't a lot to write home about here. The silly interactive bits and hair-splitting final question do give a bit more leverage over, say, a Kahoot quiz with nonsense questions and esoteric answers that sometimes repeat themselves. But other than that inch, the effect is nearly identical. Perhaps if I were trying to write a serious piece about this, I'd say that it's almost unintentionally successful in producing this looming sense of dread through its repetition and that the structure of failing a bajillion times to finally succeed is similar to, fuck it, I don't know, Dark Souls? But I'm not writing for Kotaku over here. The overall question this all makes me ask is: is it even worth that? And by its own admission, I don't think it is. The Impossible Quiz is more obtuse than punk, but it has the right spirit, and I guess that counts enough to warrant this as not an absolute trainwreck?

But I still wouldn't recommend playing it.

Dishonored is one of the few games I've ever played where a direct recommendation of "play this with a controller/keyboard and mouse" cannot be made. Generally speaking, I enjoy playing stealth games with a controller. Stealth, like racing games, is a genre that benefits greatly from analog sticks. At the heart of a great stealth game is nail-biting tension and suspense. Vulnerability is stressed through risk outweighing reward. On a keyboard, all of your inputs are static. Are you pressing up? Good, you're moving up. Jolting an analog stick up can mean the difference between shuffling silently and bringing in nearby ears for inspection. Even in games where this choice tends to be an illusion, it heightens the already high stakes of weaving in and out of crowded spaces as little more than a specter in the night. If that's how you choose to play Dishonored, I recommend it. Leaning and inventory management can feel a little less natural than they would on a keyboard, but they're functional and aren't as distracting as they could potentially be. In the words of Godd Howard himself, "it just works."

The other side of the coin is this: combat-based playthroughs require vastly more precision than two analog sticks can allow. Far from the stealth game half of this game is, aggressive playstyles in Dishonored turn the game into a psychotically frenetic action-platformer about style. The ability to teleport goes from a neat tool for traversing large areas undetected to a weapon that allows you to change your position on the fly. Double jumping allows you to exploit the verticality of each level, creating moments where countering an attack means raising a blade from above as often as it does parrying a swing. Grenade kills are a gory spectacle that separates torsos from limbs and then torsos from themselves. But this brutality exists for more than shock value alone. Each decapitated body part can be picked up and thrown to be used as a distraction or to stagger oncoming attacks. Being of the same lineage of Dark Messiah, Dishonored features a host of supernatural abilities to go alongside teleportation, one of which allows you to throw enemies to the ground with a gust of wind. Paired with the ability to stop time completely, falling bodies go from quick executions to rather grim bridges used to access nearby rooftops. Also paired with the ability to turn the weapons of your enemies into your own, it allows you to disintegrate unaware platoons. As both a stealth game and a power fantasy, Dishonored succeeds.

As a narrative? I don't know what to tell you. This is where things start to get a little bit more complicated. At the heart of Dishonored isn't its cast of characters or the journey you go on but the morality of your actions. The choice to go silent or to leave bodies in your wake is one not only made for your character but the world he lives in. Going on a murderous rampage causes everyone to hate you while the world falls to shit. It's daring and bold, and I can't say it works entirely because this game loves to give you tools to just murder the fuck out of everyone. Your supernatural powers can be used to sneak around guards. But when upgrades can make my powers deadlier while others encourage me to go on thoughtlessly violent killing sprees, I don't know if I feel like the game is trying to instill any morals in me and succeeding in its job. Especially since the detail of this setting only makes me care about the characters I'm told to get rid of, the non-violent approach to Dishonored's narrative can feel a bit hollow.

Outside of that, though, this is one of the best immersive sims I've ever played. This is one of those quintessential 'reload your save every five minutes' games, and it's always a blast to revisit. I do wish its attitude toward women were a little friendlier. I wouldn't say it's the most misogynistic game I've ever played, but averypaledog's review hits the nail on its head.

BitLife is so hip that I created a character who was an 80-year-old grandmother, formerly a hitman-turned-captain for the Yakuza with a body count in the 50s, and she still found time to watch gaming YouTubers with her friends. At first, this is very funny in a jarring, somewhat dissonant way. But after seeing it just a couple of times, the charm wears off quickly. BitLife feels every bit like the hollow imitation it is. The primary source of woe for me here is that BitLife never, ever escapes its artifice. The emergent gameplay that makes The Sims stand out feels entirely pre-canned here, and the relationship mechanics on display are this stunningly noxious blend of one-dimensional and high-maintenance, so there's no real drama to be found, either. BitLife feels too clean, too manufactured, to stand out as little more than a version of The Sims on your phone with less clunky controls.

This is perfectly fine if you just need to kill time on a train ride, but since the most entertaining thing about it (being able to escape prison within a second by breaking the puzzle sequence with keyboard controls) has been patched out, and most of the mechanics that might threaten to redeem the experience are locked behind a paywall, there really isn't much sustainability past that. I originally wrote that I would have been happy to pay twenty to thirty bucks for this instead of having to deal with those microtransactions, but this, at best, is worth ten dollars.

I have put maybe an hour or two into Silent Hill 2, and I know it's a game that I need to finish at some point. I know the great twist, I've had that spoiled for me god knows how many times. I honestly put it into the same camp that I have movies like Alien in: even if there's something in there that surprises me, having the big moments ripped off like a band-aid purely through pop culture osmosis dampers my curiosity somewhat. All of this is to say, while you may not personally be excited for new Silent Hill games, I'm just curious to see something new. Since I was only really around for P.T. once that was spoiled for me, too, I'm not counting it—which leaves me with the newly released The Short Message.

I did not get the hate that this got over its leaks, and having finally played it, I still don't. Having seen those leaks, I actually have more of an appreciation for this; I know now that this was pretty cohesive in its themes and intention when it needed it to be and never deviated from that. I don't mind a lack of subtlety, as long as the bluntness of what you're working on is there for a good reason, and I found the reasoning for it here to be acceptable. It's laser-focused on what it wants and needs to say from beginning to end, and this focus is echoed throughout the spaces you explore. Although I can see someone being a little irritated that this is linear to the point where doors don't unlock unless you read certain notes, most of those notes serve the story and not the lore. There are notes that serve the lore, but they all feed you the right amount of information while giving you space to think. What impressed me on an immediate level were the cinematics. I genuinely can't tell if they were live-action or rendered, although I know that they were likely rendered. It's uncanny as hell, but it's equally impressive. What impressed me throughout, however, is how well this serves as a mood piece. Each and every location, whether it was important or minor, made me feel something. This is more of a vibes game than something substantive or scary, and while that might be disappointing if you're going in expecting serious scares, it kept me hooked. One concern I do have, if this is the playable teaser many are making it out to be, is that the only area where I noticed evident performance issues was when I was near fog. If the new Silent Hill games are all going to lack the fog or run like shit because of it, we might be in for a doozy. But regardless of that one scene, the rest of this was pretty solid! ...for the most part.

Yeah, those chase scenes, man. I'm a little biased because I already don't like chase scenes, but something about them here felt either like filler or downright infuriating to deal with. If it weren't for the last chase sequence, my rating for this would absolutely be three-and-a-half stars because the vibes were just that immaculate for me. But no, god, no. I don't know if I ever want to go through that again. Put it this way: the game doesn't make a big deal about which rooms you go into because of its linear trajectory until the final chase sequence, where it expects you to remember the layout of the map like the back of your hand while elements of it feel completely different. It expects you to find five photographs in this mess without giving you a map or checkpoints. At a certain point, the stress I was intended to feel gave way to frustration. The only reason I didn't stop playing there was because I wanted to see the ending. That was it. The ending was nice, and there was a cute little tune that played over the credits (way more people worked on this than any other free game I've ever played), but I don't think that forgives it. It was that bad. At least the creature design was cool, though—although I found it to be scarier in the leaked concept art than I did in the final product. Consequences of having that kind of stuff leak, I guess. Whoops! Feel bad for the developers on that front, because I'm probably not alone in that.

What I liked about this, I really liked. If a new Silent Hill game is made from this mold, I wouldn't mind, actually. The Silent Hill 2 remake being a horror game that needs to have a trailer dedicated to its combat should say something about how skeptical I am of that, but I might also check it out when it's on sale. If this and that trailer is Konami's way of getting people back on the Silent Hill hype train... I mean, I wouldn't call this embarrassing. This was cool. But, 7/10.

Ah yes, my favourite part of Indiana Jones: that scene where Indy's attempts to demolish Cairo was repeatedly gatekept by a horde of monkeys holding all the vital tools.

After tackling Star Wars, Bionicle, Star Wars and...Star Wars, it was clear that Traveller's Tales had figured out what formula and franchise worked best for making these Lego games. However, they had run out of Star Wars movies to make videogames out of (right? right??) and thus, it was time for another IP. I don't know whether it was their choice, or something that the Lego Group mandated from them (to coincide with their own toyline the same year, which itself would coincide with the 4th movie), but it's perhaps appropriate that it turned out to be the other popular George Lucas trilogy. And given the popularity of franchises such as Tomb Raider (and Uncharted just the year prior) it was proven that such a theme works pretty well in videogame form. Traveller's Tales took all this...and make Lego Star Wars wearing the plastic skin of Indy and friends.

Hell, "Indy and friends" could sum up the first big flaw with this installment: Indiana Jones is not at all known for its rich vault of established characters. For each movie, you've got Indy, token love interest, token sidekick, and token villain. And of course, lots and lots of Nazis/culturally insensitive stereotypes! With such a poor roster of characters, especially off of the back of Star Wars, coupled with a setting that is generally grounded in reality beyond the supernatural nature of whatever artefact everyone's fighting over, you get some truly desperate attempts to create differing character classes. Indy? Well, all like, 10 versions of him do the same shit; he's the only one who can use the whip, which is needed for like 50% of the game's progression. Uhh...Nazis can go through Nazi doors...Women can checks notes jump higher, Willie specifically can...uh, scream, really loud, breaking glass...now I know that they were really stuck for ideas, especially when a lot of aspects of films are problematic, but damn.

Beyond the character cast, the levels and gameplay are going to look very familiar to Lego Star Wars, though there are a lot of new mechanics that I'm pretty sure are thrown in as a desperate attempt to avoid being accused of being a reskin. Build stuff out of lego to progress or reach secrets, break other stuff made out of lego for money, levers, switches, pushing blocks, all the classics. As before, all levels have 10 shiny objects to collect, as well as a separate collectible that grants you a "cheat" you can purchase at the hub world. What I do actually like is that unlike Star Wars, where said collectible was simply another hidden object to find and pick up, this time you have to both discover a parcel, and the mailbox to carry it to and put it in. Unfortunately, this highlights one of the new mechanics that I'm not too fond of.

Of the new mechanics, the one you'll probably spend most of your time doing is picking up objects. These can be small ones, such as bottles or chairs to throw at enemies, or even swords and guns (the latter of which can actually run out of ammo)...but you'll also be doing this for puzzle solving. Let me tell you, there's little else more tedious in this world than slowly, painfully carrying a large object to its destination, let alone like, 100 times over. There's also rope climbing, except sometimes you can only swing from ropes instead of climbing them and it's never obvious which ones are which. Combat, with the obvious lack of lightsabers, also now mainly tilts towards firearm superiority, which are often one-hit-kills against enemies. Melee weapons are slow and clunky to use in groups, and Indy's melee attacks specifically have these overly long comedy animations, where he kills the enemy in some silly manner, like a lethal noogie.

In fact, wasting time is probably my biggest criticism. Aside from the Indy melee animations, opening Nazi checkpoints takes an ungodly amount of time. You knock like, 7 times, watch the window slowly open, have the Nazi spend like 3 entire seconds checking you out, then he nods like, four times. Four. Then the door finally opens, like 10 total seconds later. The statues you have to pray to are also offenders, although not nearly as badly. Hell, there are cheats to speed up the more tedious animations, such as digging and repairing. Nothing for those damn Nazi checkpoints, though!

Of course, beyond all the grievances, and how adapting Indiana Jones into the Lego Star Wars formula is a bit of a doomed undertaking, the actual, minute to minute gameplay is fine! It's just Star Wars again, but a bit different, a bit jankier, but with a few adjustments for the better. You can finally, finally save and exit a level in free play while keeping what you obtained! Still no checkpoints of any kind, but it's something. The level designs themselves can be pretty creative and fun, although certain levels drop the ball hard (looking at YOU, Motorcycle Escape!). And of course, the cutscenes adapt all the famous moments from these movies while adding in cartoonish slapstick (and uh, removing all the bits where the Nazis are actually Nazis, and the weird stuff with Mola Ram and that guys' heart...). The John Williams soundtrack is there, and it wouldn't be right without it...though, I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't a little sick to death of hearing them on loop for 20 hours so soon after playing Lego Star Wars.

All in all, this is a simple enjoyable kids game, complete with classic couch co-op drop-in/out, and is sure not to fall too far from the Lego Star Wars tree. Even if not all of its changes are for the better, this is a perfectly competent videogame with a lot of small issues that neither the developers nor the target audience probably gave a shit about.

But I'm a gamer, so naturally, I'm furious.

Replayed RE4, this time using the "real" version with controller rather than mouse and keyboard. The argument I had heard was that re4 wasn't properly balanced for mouselook, which makes the broken headshot + kick combo for crowd control a lot easier. And after playing it, yeah that's definitely the case, especially at first.This WAS my second playthrough though, and after getting used to the stiffness (and the added clunkiness of playing on a handheld switch with default joycons) I found it to not be that much harder than the PC version.

Its a credit to RE4 that even when I was playing horrendously, getting my ass handed to me by that initial village siege and even running out of ammo a few times in the beginning, I was still having a blast. Its also probably indicative of RE4's dynamic difficulty system, that I struggled the most with the early game, so I'm guessing it took pity on me. I admit I haven't played the other RE games other than a bit of Revelations 2, mainly because they seem more horror-y and less action-y.

I played through RE4 during a weeklong trip to london where I was away from my PC. Unfortunately that meant I had to interrupt my playthrough of Killer 7 (which does share some surface similarities to RE4, both part of the capcom 5, both made by mikami, both combine puzzles and shooting at slow enemies, etc) which due to my ADHD almost always murders my motivation/interest for a game. It proved to be the case here as well, I'll have to complete the second half of that game at some other point in the future.

I also attempted pro-mode for re4 but quite frankly, it's beyond my abilities. I made it to stage 3-2 or so and I just couldn't play well enough to not be stomped on by the onslaught of cultists. Supporting my theory that RE4's dynamic difficulty was going easy on me, as pro mode simply locks you to the highest difficulty the whole way through. Its a shame, because for the first few levels, it actually increased my enjoyment of RE4, by forcing me to play "better", exploiting every advantage and learning new strats to overcome the insane odds.

I still think the island is lame, as long as the castle goes on for, I think its the high point for the game. Its also insane to me that the Del Lago bossfight is the first bossfight in the game. First of all, because it sucks, the worst bossfight in the game imo, but also because you'd think the gimmick boss fight using different-ish mechanics to the core gameplay would be put in around the middle or something, to shake things up, but no. Its especially weird cause almost inmediately you have El Gigante which is both a better bossfight and would make a much better first boss.

I still had to laugh during the cutscene before Del Lago, when the castillian peasant says "andale". To those who don't know about spanish dialects, thats like making a game set in rural australia and seeing a random bogan say in his best Larry the Cable guy impression : git er dun! Or something along those lines. Its not even just that the NPCs sound mexican or whatever, cause some of them sound like spanish isn't their first language, others sound plausibly from mainland spain but their dialogue was seemingly machine translated from english? And okay, they kinda get the benefit of the doubt cause the location within spain is never specified, but their pronunciation of "imbecil" indicates they use "seseo" which would mean they are either in southern spain or the canary islands, neither of which sound likely. The real answer is "who gives a shit? They grabbed whomever around the office who knew some spanish and put em in the recording booth" and It doesn't actually bother me, hell, Ive heard the remake replaces the VO with more accurate, professional voices and that sounds lame as hell.

So yeah, RE4 is still good, and now I can say I beat it "properly".

played with the Second Term DLC

Each time I do runs of Monster Prom, I'm surprised at how much I enjoy it. I don't mean this as a put down I use to mask my insecurity or the veil of "guilty pleasure", I mean it more so as to how many elements in this are and are not my thing.

I don't like how the conversational function of the RNG is executed. It's not that there's too many variables or whatnot, more so that it's hard to parse. Alongside the general wooing from each interaction - doesn't even have to be a successful one, but obviously doing it correctly nets the bigger bonus - there's a hidden check behind the scenes that'll tick on whether your chosen candidate will take up your offer to prom, yet the game never so much as to allude to the fact, meaning you're sort of supposed to figure it out either by guess work, careful assessment of the game's stat system and how they would correlate with a certain character, or a flat-out guide. There are sentences that are either easy to make educated assumptions as to what stat represents them, or are like worded in such a way they can refer to multiple different ones instead. Also not helping is that, if two stats for an event are tied in numerical value, you sometimes get the "fail" state anyway. Again, you more or less have to bust out a guide for this, even if some can be rather unfinished due to how many events and outcomes are available with or without the aforementioned DLC.

There's also the writing. As someone that has largely abstained from going "this is just [WEBSITE] bait" since it sounds super fuckin stupid and asinine, even I gotta admit the prose and general dialog is particularly Tumblr-aligned: meta humor, hyperspecific pop culture nods of varying years, different ties into fandom culture (I didn't get the event this time unlike in 2021, but they can sometimes talk about Starco and Markypoo, ship names in regards to Star Vs The Forces Of Evil. I am not making this up.), gags relying on overly simplifying a character's main trait, some strangely focused angles on fetishistic kinks here and there, stuff of those nature. In fact, if you squint your eyes real hard, you can even feel traces of Homestuck seeping in the depths of the fish girl Miranda Vanderblit, or how werewolf Scott Howl is literally just a stand-in for Arin Hanson, right down to being voiced by him! I'm pretty sure JackSepticEye also voices a character introduced in one of the game's updates... Also there's a Kappa character in the Second Term DLC that's pretty clearly supposed to be a manifestation of right-wing shitheels, but it isn't really like, funny, he annoys me just as much as the real ones do.

It has a number of strains, but thankfully I'm not jaded from online shenanigans just yet, so I can just sit back and enjoy the ride still. In my replay, I have done things such as

- car breeding
- a wild conspiracy journey about the meaning of the Caganer with literal hothead demon prince Damien and hipster vampire douche Liam de Lioncourt
- convincing the bitchy gorgon Vera Oberlin to cut off one of her snake heads to set an example for the others
- somehow ended up teaching yaoi to Liam, as a heads up for the imgur album, there's nothing explicit but it is rather raunchy
- brought a corpse to prom
- Zoe. Just, just Zoe. She was my favorite from the whole game despite being limited to the DLC.

Also sad to announce I did find some of it funny. I even laughed hard at a couple of lines, mostly the intentional ones anyway. It seems I too am just as wired to the infrastructure like some people are. Aw well. Really the only main lead I didn't laugh with was Scott for obvious reasons, Polly can be fun. Plus, I said the conversational RNG is rather bad, the other forms such as which events are triggered and increasing the stats are pretty easy to game the system on. I play this solo so I can't quite say for certain how they'd work for a multiplayer session, nor am I a diehard completionist so I'm not willing to see how bad this can get, but for casual endeavors at least it's competent and solid.

Hopefully the abundant of imgur images I've uploaded has shown the great artwork by Arthur 'CptHamburger', who's pretty active on social media and has an ArtStation page to boot. Even the protag designs are slam dunks, which makes me pretty glad the game has a pronoun option (no custom ones, only he/she/they) so I can just pick whichever when I feel like it. Already showed one of Zoe's routes is about her trans status, and I think there's supposed to be a polygamous ending in the DLC too? I'm cis and strictly monogamous, so I dunno how enticing and well-meaning these elements can be to other LGBT+ folk, but I feel there's enough of a grasp of honest intent and learning available to commend their efforts.

Should be noted that it's best to approach this as it's structured, which is mainly as a party affair than a strictly VN-like experience. I mean, you could do that, but considering you're dealing with either a 30 or 60 minute session with the potential of seeing the same sort of flow and dialog over and over, it's an easy way to obtain burn out. Just go with the flow.

I do have Monster Camp and Monster Trip, so I should take a look at those down the line, see if they improved on the formula or not.

After Fear & Hunger peaked my interest and watching videos and reading stuff about it , starting to play it full of confidence and thinking that I’d know how to play around its trickery a lil’ bit, only for a malformed Guard to cut my arm off and beat me up till I had no health left, waking up right after without either of my legs and bleeding, surrounded by bodies and gore from which I had to claw and crawl my way out off, trying desperately to find an exit and ending up yet another enemy who promptly took away the only health point I had left, and just when I thought I had finally died for real this time, I woke up once again, and was able to witness how said enemy did something I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t even lay on text on here, watched as the world faded away on those last moments of struggle… that was easily one of the most grotesque, vile yet humbling moments a game ever made me feel.

A feeling that is not mere terror and borders true helplessness, a fate brought by chance and my own hubris, the single best and worst fucking way the game could introduce itself. The Gods are too far away to hear your prayers asking for this madness to stop, but maybe that’s a good thing… maybe a worse fate would await you if they were able to hear them.

The dungeons of Fear and Hunger occupy a space that fascinate me, and it’s kinda funny how that’s a statement that serves well for both the context and lore of the game’s world and outside of it; at its more distilled, Fear & Hunger seems something that The Simpsons or Pen & Teller would have made to parody violence in videogames back in the 90s, it’s a collection of every possible vile or grotesque thing mashed together in a festival of cruelty and pain to such an extreme that should by any means be comical. I don’t blame anyone that hasn’t interacted with the game to only see it at that, when a game starts with a content warning such as this and it’s quite literally called Fear & Hunger, it’s easy to assume that this is gonna be some Itchy and Scratchy shit.

If Fear & Hunger was entirely about that, horrid stuff just for the sake of making people point at the screen in disgust or being cruel to ‘cause pain in the player just because, I do not think it would have garnered the following it has all these years later, it wouldn’t have grabbed me like a leech grabs to a host, that’s for sure. It still can seem a bit silly or ‘’too much’’ a few times, like when you encounter an amalgamation of human flesh and minds and it ends up speaking in the foulest yet most casual mouth you can think off, but I honestly could see those moments being done as such completely purpose, as a small acknowledgement of just how exaggerated this setting can feel at first, or maybe they are just a twisted way to have a little bit of a laugh, ‘cause believe me… there ain’t much to smile at otherwise.

The dungeon seems to have something that calls people —in this case something completely opposite to the game itself—, whether is just the impulse to try it out for yourself to wanting to explore every single part of the accursed catacombs, and when I first played the game back in October of last year… I really couldn’t see why. I could see quality, no doubt about it, but with every turn and step, I could almost feel the game physically rejecting me: being mauled by bogs, getting infected after stepping on a fucking nail and dying because of it, having and undesirable encounter with the Cavemother when arriving at the mines, losing a leg or both because I took a plunge I really shouldn’t have, or that series of, let’s just say, catastrophic events I mentioned at the beginning. Every time I loaded the save, every passing moment, every single hurdle I overcame only to always be met with another that felt even major, I always saw the intent behind it, but I never felt the satisfaction of learning it and gaining the knowledge that comes with it, it only felt like I was being kicked down a stair-case that only got deeper and deeper. I ultimately stopped playing, but I was not free of the dungeon, there was something here that, even tho I didn’t quite understand, kept me thinking about it.

And after months, I couldn’t take it anymore, I caved in, I returned to the dungeon of Fear and Hunger, and this time… well, I actually think it’d be better to say this if I use another example:

After what will be a incredibly high and grueling number of deaths and finally overcoming the upper levels of the dungeon with its Guard and flying Gnome infested halls and torture chambers, and unless you find the Thicket on your first go, you’ll most likely pull the lever you’ll encounter in one of the many rooms, which will grant you access to the elevator that will lead you to the next area… the mines. The mines are the break it or make it point for many players, and in my case, they completely broke me; not because of a certain Crow headed enemy which can break your bones and blind you or the ghost enemies you can’t even hit if you don’t have any cursed weapons or magic, those are bad, yes… But they are not the Yellow Mages. Before this point, the ways you could damaged without engaging into combat ranged from being shot with a bow or stepping on a nail, annoying and potentially mortal, but nothing too dangerous if you know what you are doing, the Yellow Mages then take this and the proceed to take it to fucko-levels. Being able to cast a spell in the overworld which, if you are close enough time or take you by surprise, will make you lose an entire limb, get hit 4 times? You lose all of them. No matter what I did, no matter what I tried, because I always arrived to them really hurt or without a companion, I either died on the overworld, or got killed by them while in combat. I felt powerless and defeated, it didn’t simply feel cruel or hard, it felt like it was a fight I didn’t even had a chance of winning ever. That was where I initially stopped playing, that was where my story with the dungeons first ended, and I look back upon it I only think of stress, fear, and frustration, a mixture of feelings I wanted anything but to experience again… who would have thought that I actually never would, even when coming back.

When I finally returned, something had… changed, not with the game itself of course, bit still, it felt different, I still picked Outlander as my starting class since I really like the survival options it gives and the amazing attack stat, I even picked the same options and the introduction since I wanted to start off with something familiar, but even tho it was the exact same, even tho the dungeon was still the same aside of some layout changes that can happen in certain areas every time you start a new run… it felt different. Maybe I went in with a different mind-set, or maybe it was the fact I already had experience from that past playthrough, but despite the fact I was still dying, despite the many errors and mistake I was making and the punishment the game was putting me through just like it did months ago… it all clicked. I was trying far more stuff, the game wasn’t just a puzlle that consisted on either fighter or evading enemies, it felt much more; the world of Fear and Hunger is as integral as the action in the battles, if not more, and gaining knowledge through books, setting traps for enemies, or even just learning how to get enemies’ souls and upgrading yourself with them, little steps that came with pain and challenges, but also with an enormous satisfaction. I’d die and have to repeat all the process over and over again, but each time faster, more efficient, even when something changed, it wasn’t mere trial and error, it was a continuous experimentation that made going from dark rooms to the deepest of chasms daunting yet worth it.

I learnt and discovered strategies to efficiently take care of the guards, how red and explosive vials can be tools for opening paths and locks but also amazing items to get out to sticky situations, I tried and experimented talking to enemies which even when it most cases didn’t led to much, in others meant basically winning the entire battle or getting an item, I even got an ability which turned the bow, a weapon that isn’t actually that great in direct conflict considering is a two-handed weapon, into something hat can one shot practically every single normal enemy outside of battle. Death at the hands of a boss or the Crowmawler never stopped feeling like a looming threat, but this time it was one that could be overcome, thanks to help of allies as well as the items you can get by defeating them, especially the boss souls. But no moment, no boss defeat, no Crowmawler kill, no item requirement felt as exciting and rewarding as going back to the Yellow Mages, saying ‘’fuck it, we ball’’, trying a new plan and it actually working, making them completely unable to cast spells in battle, and after talking to them in battle, getting an item that an help you recruit a character that not only is a strong spellcaster, but also immortal, AND THEN for him to help you through a certain part of a later area, helping you discover a laboratory that gives you a way to progress without sacrificing any party members, but also that holds one of the most powerful spears in the entire game. Fear & Hunger? More like Hopes & Dreams, because we ridin’ alive out of this one!

It's honestly fucking insane, I don’t think I could put it any other way; I really didn’t have to me an active change to the way I interacted with this experience, and yet through its punishing but constant learning curve, the never ending systems that flow into one another and give so much freedom I’m convinced 90 percent of stuff I did could have been accomplished through other means, everything about Fear & Hunger feels so impossible to describe, once you fully engage with it, not because everything in it is completely original or earth-shattering, but because how immense it feels in spite of how small the dungeon is in reality.

You never achieve a point where you are an unstoppable machine, you can be more of less comfortable with your build and party, but the menace of… you know, dying, never stops being there, your fate can always depend on a coin-toss, after all. I think that the best way to say It is that I’m glad the game is the way it is, a world where luck is a prominent factor, where you can never interact with all of it fully and where a single, tiny mistake result in permanent crippling, hell, even tho I overcame the Mages, I also lost a leg to one of them, making it so I couldn’t run for the rest of the run, one last parting reminder of what I managed to win against, but also of how another mistake like that would spell literal disaster. Yet another way for the game to punish me, yet another way to laugh at it when I triumph despite it all, if you could consider any of this ‘’triumph’’.
Fear & Hunger’s sheer madness and punishments wouldn’t be what they are if it wasn’t because of its world, a world I can’t call alive, not because it doesn’t feel like it, but because it reeks of everything foul thing imaginable. Hell, at times you can be the foul thing, I had to attack an entire village ‘cause I made an accident and fucked up! It fucking sucked and I felt so terrible about it to the point of contemplating trying to load a past save? You bet I did! You are told many times that the dungeon is a horrible place, but no words truly do it justice; it gets worse as you delve deeper, and deeper it delves, to the point of questioning what’s the logic behind this walls, if none. Wretched beings brough by desperation or corruption, fauna perverted by the darkness trying to survive, cults that serve different old gods but share the same madness, and a story of fellowships both in the past and present, all searching something in the dungeon, be it someone, something, desire, or godhood. Fear & Hunger doesn’t have much narrative, the one present being defined and individual to each of the characters, but the story behind and in it is so fascinating to learn about and so horrifying to truly understand that gives so much more force to said individual narratives and a killer fantasy setting.

There are so many reasons the dungeon calls to so many, but I think it all comes down to the experience itself, the idea of finding something you shouldn’t, of continuously experimenting and winning thanks to it, of trying to about starvation and madness by all means and only grabbing onto it by the tip of your fingers, and the idea that every run can go differently not so much because of the random items (tho thank All-Mer for the ones that always are on the same place no matter what) but by decisions you take, the path you decide to go down from, the enemies you face or ignore, the friends or enemies you make. When arriving at the city of M'habre, which has to be my favorite section in the whole game, you could theoretically skip all of it if you killed the other playable characters as Knight or used a ton of Empty Scrolls. You can basically skip three whole major boss fights if you really want to. The fact that’s even a possibility shatters my feeble mind more than spamming Black Orb.

If anything, Fear & Hunger biggest problem isn’t something related to the game itself… it’s how fucking broken it is. I swear the code must have been written on a scroll or something, ‘cause the amount of bugs and glitches is… not really immense, but they a constant and some can even break the game completely, getting you stuck in certain sections or one entire area before the final bosses of ending A and B being completely broken, and in one in particular made me receive that Yellow Mage attack constantly, which honestly may seem poetic, but it made me look an entire hour for solutions, and I ended up having to repeat the whole thing while praying it didn’t happen again. If by any chance what I’ve said about the game has caught your eye and want to give it a shot, by any means, do, but please, install one of the many bug fix patched made by fand (some also include censor mods which is also pretty cool), I should have done it and makes things much better, butt he fact the game still has some of these is infuriating. Getting soft locked isn’t the same type of cruel that the rest of the game goes for, it’s just fucking annoying.

The adventure that awaits everyone in Fear & Hunger is always terrifying, it’s always a race against time and insanity, always a test in resource management and decision making… but it’s also always different, maybe sometimes in the smallest of ways, but that makes an impact, nonetheless. The dungeon forces its players are forced to get creative through sheer cruelty, but it makes those moments of glimmering light the more valuable; even when there are no happy endings at the end of the line, most come down to a simple question; will you let the dungeon change you? Or will you be the one to change the dungeon? Fear & Hunger I can’t recommend like others, if you weren’t interested by it or its premise really irks you, then I don’t think most if the things I said will make you change your mind, and that’s totally fine! I just wanted to tell of my experience with it, what I learnt, what it made me feels, and how it’s much more than it seems, and despite the pain it can induce, travelling into the unknown comes with risks, so part of the course…

After getting endings A, B, D and E, I can say that I have learnt something for sure… Gods are REALLY weak to poison, which hey, kinda nice kowing I can stop an eldritch abomination with a lil’ bit of insecticide!

Infinite Wealth takes all of the good that was established in Yakuza: Like A Dragon and decides "you know, all of the weird, rigid things to make it more like a classic RPG made it weird and rigid. Let's smooth all those out". And then boom, the job system is suddenly a lot more flexible, the gameplay system is significantly better made to take advantage of positional combat, the simple addition of being able to wipe out an encounter for slightly reduced EXP if you're multiple levels over them is a godsend to traversal. To make up for your time not being held up by random battles as often, Infinite Wealth is filled to its gills with content, and goes to the furthest reaches of the LAD series' goofiness for its scenarios, substories, and general tone. This is among one of the most consistently funny titles that uses its absurdity to constantly add more animations, more gameplay systems, more mini-games that could be their own games to add in to the general level of zaniness. And when you are ping-ponging between taking pictures of perverts in a rail shooter segment, having Sam Rigel tell you puns while you try to mine enough gold ore so that you can make the golden statue of Goro Majima you want to make for the sleazy district of your resort island, petting the weird man dressed as Captain Crunch that agreed to fight for you in the underground sicko fighting ring because you NEED a water-type Sujimon with high attack, helping investigate this woman claiming her chicken was abducted by aliens, and learning how your friends somehow all know what a Sega Dreamcast is still, the game is an utterly daunting amount of content that refuses to stop giving.

It then decides to hinge its plot on two VERY important facets: the fact that you (as the player) likely REALLY like Ichiban Kasuga as a character and that he's just an inherently likable guy to the world around him, and the fact that Kazuma Kiryu is really, really tired and deserves a rest, but refuses to take it. The game milks these aspects for all they're worth, giving Ichiban every opportunity to show off his larger-than-life personality and weaponize it to win others over, whilst utilizing Kiryu to properly reminisce about the Yakuza series that came before, the overwhelming totality of his legacy, and his place in it moving forward. The game manages to create a beautiful balance between its bittersweet moments and its riotous future to make for an absolutely intoxicating adventure that seems to just KEEP going and CONTINUE expanding until well into the 70, 80 hour mark where you can drag yourself back to the main plotline.

... and it's, unfortunately, here where Infinite Wealth falters for me. The previous two Like A Dragon games have two of the strongest endings I have ever encountered in a game, as they end with incredibly personal stories coming to fruition and either resolving or continuing in some of the most emotionally resonant scenes I've ever seen in a game. Infinite Wealth was unlikely to reach these, but it spreads itself so thin with the minutea of the game that the main plot takes a bit of a backseat, reaching for all of these grand ideas and statements and political plans. Some of the twists in the middle of it are QUITE strong, but it seems like a lot of pieces that were thrown into the mix had to be consolidated and resolved in a hurry. Ultimately, the note that Infinite Wealth leaves on is a satisfying one, but the individual steps to get there are not nearly as thrilling as one would hope. I do think that I prefer the first of Ichiban's games for the stronger emotional arc it takes me on - which is hard to say, going back to it after Infinite Wealth's improvements is difficult! - but I will say that Infinite Wealth is probably the MOST Yakuza any Yakuza game has been. And that's worth something!

Is this still in the public consciousness? I'm never sure with these fad sort of games how much longterm impact they have for people. Myself, I come back to this every now and again for something to do if I need something mindless as stimulus, like if I'm on the phone and need something to do while I'm listening to keep from falling asleep.

It's easy to see why this ended up being a fad. It is a mathy game, but only in its loosest sense. You're more interested in matching iconography, and if you can keep the patterns straight, you could just as easily swap out those numbers for any other sort of images or glyphs. I do think it becomes a solved puzzle fairly quickly once you find an optimal play (move everything towards a corner, start forming lines so you can easily add everything up in a chain), after which point there isn't much variety to the experience. The only obstacle there is RNG; sometimes you need to move your high corner block to force a 2 or 4 block to spawn, and sometimes that spawn happens where your high block was. I have been screwed over by that more times than I can recall.

I do come back to this fairly often, like I said, since it serves a very specific purpose for me. But generally, when I'm playing this, I'd rather be playing almost anything else.