I love this game’s visual design. It’s tragically rather undercut by how the lighting is wayyyyyyyyy oversaturated — and washes out everything it touches — but there are so many cool things here otherwise. The abandoned apartments feel so grotty: all the litter everywhere, the layers of graffiti covering the walls, the layers of dust and mold and mess that lends so much character to the world around you. The design of the monster is so evocative — how it seems like the cherry blossoms are trying to burst through its skin — and I’m a fan of how, by design, you’re never quite able to see its full image, at least not for more than a glimpse's worth. I love how the flashback cutscenes showing Maya so effortlessly segue between graphics and what looks so convincingly like FMV, really helping to contribute to the idiosyncratic, off-kilter vibe the game takes whenever we go to the past. I’m not quite sure how much of this is meant to be a tech demo — or whether this really is just meant to stand on its own — but if the aim was to show off its engine it certainly succeeded on that front, even if it’s more the artstyle itself that stands out over its graphical fidelity. And even if it really could have used an option to lower the brightness.

It’s a bit sad, in that case, that I’m rather less into most everything else. Particularly the writing. There’s promise in the premise: I could certainly see a world where I really vibe with what the game has to offer, but I think where this game is let down most is by its dialogue. There’s no subtlety. The game will spell out everything a particular moment is trying to communicate just in case you might not get it. It kinda suffers from a lack of patience, too. There’s this one segment that earnestly does the PT-style looping hallway in a way that gels super well with what’s going on thematically, setting the stage to perfectly represent the downward spiral you know is coming... then the game proceeds to throw you straight down to the bottom, having things immediately go wrong and having the whole thing only end after, like, three loops. Things and themes are brought up and then never quite mentioned again, and while one of those is the kind of painful portrayal of social media and The Gen Z Quest For Likes which I was happy to see go, there’s some stuff that really felt like it needed to be addressed or expanded on which… wasn’t. You’d think that if there’s a scene where (I think) the main character grabs a razor to cut her wrists, with the scars on their arm indicating that this is a rather routine thing, that that might… come up later, but if you thought that, you thought wrong. It just kind of happens. And unless there was something I missed… it never gets brought up again. Feels like a bit of an oversight.

(also: the game is set in Germany and yet… the characters are going to college? but can’t actually go to college because they… have to pay tuition fees? the americans might not realize that other countries don’t work the same way the US does, but trust me, we’ll notice your cultural assumptions :V)

The script never feels particularly naturalistic, either. Characters go through stuff and talk about the stuff they go through like it’s some sort of cyberbullying PSA, and… as somebody who went through some of the sort of stuff some of the characters here did, it never really felt like my experience. I know that it’s loosely going for heightened reality — I don’t think the game was literally suggesting that our character walked down her school hallways every day while random jocks yelled “Go away!” and “Slut!” and shoved her towards the lockers — but if the game is really trying to sell this as a real thing people go through, I feel like maybe there could’ve been an ear towards having the bullies say things bullys actually say. If you’re going to talk about how The Gen Z Quest For Likes makes people feel alienated and inferior from their peers, maybe don’t make it seem like you’re making fun of it instead. If you’re trying to treat the complicated and nuanced topic of suicide and mental health with the care and respect that’s required… Look, I wouldn’t necessarily say this game is as triggering on the subject of mental health and suicide as others made me think it might be (it never goes as far about it as, say, something like 13 Reasons Why or Doki Doki Literature Club ever did) but also it was insanely funny just how many times they throw the content warning disclaimer at you. Like, I read through it when I started the game. You don’t have to show it again every time you portray something that could be a representation fucky-wucky. It just kinda makes your case worse.

There’s other things, as well: the chase sequences were kind of annoying to play. They’re like this weird looping maze you have to brute force until you find the arbitrarily correct way through and also the monster will just suddenly appear from in front of you and immediately kill you if you can’t react in time and I haaaaaated having to do them. Overall, though, I’m… rather mixed on this. In a way where it really could’ve been something I liked, as well. Because while visually the game is rather adept, below the surface… god the writing really betrays it, especially the slipshot way it handles its delicate, complicated thematic material. If this is a teaser of the future of the Silent Hill franchise, it’s… certainly indicative of what’s to come. In more ways than one.

When I covered Squirrel Stapler in its original form, I noted that the updated version at least seemed like it was taking steps in the right direction, working on deepening what was already there as opposed to expanding the (already rather long) length of the original. What I didn’t quite realize was that that was a joke: the “expanded mechanics” talked about are random stalls plonked around the forest that at best, only superficially add to the game, poking fun at how some game rereleases tend to add things that futz with the original game to justify their own existence — kind of like The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe in that regard. What the rerelease does do, however, is make the game feel much more friendly to play: the forest is a lot more populated so you don’t have to scour the landscape for several minutes just trying to find (and then go through the whole process of sneaking up on) a single squirrel, and there seem to be fewer enemies, keeping death as a setback but also making it much less frequent as it sometimes got in the original. It doesn't quite fix what I felt to be the biggest problem with the original version: days 3-5 still feel like the same loop three times without much added in between. At the very least, though, the quality of life changes make it much easier to deal with, and helps the game lean in on its strengths: the way the narrative builds up, the way the game simplifies/parodies the mechanics of a hunting simulator while still managing to emulate the general feel, and how the game (like others from its creator) builds up this absolutely bizarre premise around the player yet makes it feel like the most normal thing in the world. They’re perhaps not the iterations I maybe wanted to see going in (and I do wish day 4, in particular, didn't feel like the game was repeating itself), but they are improvements, and as a whole I’d recommend this as the definitive Squirrel Stapler. I got to see God this time :).

Okay, I can’t in good conscience claim that Harvester has aged all that well — especially compared to some of its 90s adventure game contemporaries — but man, does it truly do a lot for a game from 1995. To me it’s loosely the true definition of a guilty pleasure: something I legitimately like and will defend, as opposed to, say, something I like ironically or something I like for how bad it is. It mostly just comes down to how Harvester feels like… honestly like nothing else I’ve played before. It’s prone to misfiring on some of its ideas, and there are major aspects of gameplay that… I’ll get to later, but as a whole it’s an absolutely fascinating game that, for an early adventure game, does feel ahead of its time in certain aspects and doesn’t have any other particular comparison point today.

You play as an (alleged) teenager who wakes up with absolutely no memory of who or where he is. Through interacting with your NPC family and following where they lead you, you get filled in — your name is Steve, you live in the beautiful small town of Harvest, and you’re scheduled to get married to your sweetheart Stephanie next week. However, upon visiting the bride-to-be, you find out that, like you, Stephanie is also an amnesiac, and the two of you realize that there is something deeply up with the town of Harvest. To try and solve its mysteries, and to try and find a way out for you and Stephanie, you decide to investigate The Order of the Harvest Moon: an exclusive club that the town of Harvest seems to revolve around, and, as you attempt to join so you can enter the building, Steve finds himself participating in trials built to tear the town apart, and test just how far he can go over the edge.

And I’d just love to state how immensely I love this game’s vibe. Nearly every NPC you meet gives off the aura, of, like, some person who sits next to you on the bus who won’t stop talking about the weirdest shit who you wanna try and humour at first even though you’re a bit uncomfortable but who rapidly brings the conversation to bad territory to the point where you wanna get away from them as soon as possible and it really helps to give this game this surreal, disturbing… but also fun vibe, in a black-comedy sort of way. There are people who come off more relatively normal… but your actions either drive them away or show them to be as off-kilter as the rest of the town — which does an excellent job at making things escalate through the game and showing the effect of what you’re doing. This all seems to have an end goal of satirizing 50s small-town America and exposing what's beneath the idyllic exterior, and to that end, I think it works. While there are beats that I wish had more thought put into them (I preferred stuff like the firefighters over ‘all the natives are drunk and homeless’) I… genuinely liked figuring out what the game was going for thematically, and combined with generally sharp and fun writing nearly across the board, this game… very much delivers, story wise.

And for an adventure game released in the 90s, it’s also surprisingly functional! It manages to avoid a lot of the general trappings of the time (ways to render the game unbeatable, puzzles working on insane trains of logic, more items than you actually ever use) to create a functional and enjoyable experience based more on interaction and exploration than anything else. I also like how typical RPG/adventure game conventions get subverted — instead of doing quests to make others happy and make the town a better place, what you do in Harvester instead has adverse effects, harming people and tearing the town apart at an escalating level that directly calls into question what exactly it is you’re doing. There’s also combat! It’s… exactly as clunky and rough as you would expect for combat in a 90s adventure game, but it’s… at least kind of funny in its application and it’s only ever required once or twice so I could kind of shrug it aside as something that contributed to the game’s charm…

…Until you reach the Lodge — the base of the Order of the Harvest Moon, and where you spend the last third-ish of the game. It’s… honestly one of the worst things I've ever had to endure? The once thankfully-infrequent combat is now constant, with the final challenge before the ending putting you through ten arduous and clunky combat encounters back to back without any sort of break or ability to recoup. There’s now an element of resource management in play in terms of healing and ammo… but the game doesn’t give you nearly enough to deal with what it dishes out and you have absolutely no sense of when, exactly, you’re going to get more or when you’re actually reaching the end of the trek. The writing also takes a dip here: the game loses its ability to teeter the line between vaguely-possible-person and insane mouthpiece as constant new characters appear on the spot to monologue about the ills of society before trying to shoot you. This all leads up to a final reveal which… discards the narrative the game was pushing towards all for a whole new narrative which doesn’t really link up with what was going on before. There’s… a certain sense of amusement to be had in wondering what weird thing you’re going to see next, but it feels so… slapdash compared to what the game had been going for earlier, and gameplay-wise it’s just so unpleasant that it’s hard to glean any sort of fun out of it. The first time I played through I was caught completely unprepared and was just so shocked at how hard a drop it was compared to everything before it — and while I was able to go through it a lot more smoothly this time since I knew what was happening… god, what a miserable way to end the game.

But I still, at least, really like most everything that happens up until that point. Even with the presence of really bad, awful combat, and even with the spectre of The Lodge tainting the last third of the game… I still think Harvester’s a fun time! With fun, snappy writing that truly runs right up to the line between horror and black comedy, and with some… simple but fun adventure game design that turns the structure of ‘do puzzles and quests to make everything better’ completely on its head, Harvester is a guilty pleasure that despite… many issues I think holds up and is still somewhat incomparable today. 7/10.

I can’t profess to know fully the timeline of triple-A gaming — just when exactly we reached the shift towards what we’re getting now — but something funny I found as I played through David Cage’s Heavy Rain is how it honestly predates a lot of the trends present nowadays. The core relationship (or, at least, one of them) is between a father and his son, the latter representing the father’s attempts and desires to be redeemed of his past sins. It’s a game that’s evidently attempting to be more than just a game, to prove that the medium can be seen as art, yet, rather than leaning into being a video game, instead tries to achieve this by trying to emulate Hollywood films, with a specific focus on cinematography, hiring screen actors, using mo-cap amongst other things. It got praise in its time for bringing the medium forward its approach of interactive narrative being seen as revolutionary by mainstream critics, showing to the world what the future of gaming could be (and, admittedly, while Cage did not invent interactive narrative, he did make games such as Heavy Rain, games where “your choices matter” a trend for years to come). You even watch your child die in the first half hour of the game. I’m not sure whether it’s necessarily counted amongst, say The Last of Us or 2018's God of War in terms of cinematic AAA gaming, but to some extent it did walk so they could run. For better or worse.

The game follows four particular characters, who, while not initially knowing each other, are tied together in their attempts to find the Origami Killer: a serial killer who entraps and drowns children during periods of extreme rainfall, challenging their fathers to Saw-esque torture games where both their, and their sons, lives hang on the line. You play as Ethan Mars, who, after the accidental death of his first son, Jason, now must race against time to save his second son, Shaun, after the two of them are chosen as the Origami Killer’s next victims. You also play as Scott Shelby, a former cop turned private investigator visiting the previous victims of the origarmy Origami Killer, trying to unearth old clues to find new leads. You also also play as Detective Narmin Norman Jayden, an FBI agent investigating the origammy Origami Killer and attempting to find Shaun, while at the same time dealing with his crippling addiction to drugs and VR sunglasses. You also also also play as Madison, who, after being attacked by dream terrorists in her apartment, goes to a hotel, finds Ethan, and gloms onto him for the rest of the story. But every minute that passes is one less minute to save Shaun, and only through the four’s combined investigation may the secrets of the Origami Killer be revealed…

I’ll give it a few things: I do love all the ways individual scenes can diverge and reconvene and take into account most of the things the player does. While everything on an overall arc level tends to streamline and go down the one path, it’s kind of incredible just how differently individual scenes can diverge based on what happens, and just how many outcomes you can get. There was one early scene as Scott where a store I’m in gets targeted by a robber who doesn’t notice me. I’m encouraged to sneak up and grab a weapon, but then I fail the QTE, which leads the robber to see me and point his gun in my direction. What then follows is… a completely different scene, one where I can either try and talk the robber down, or try and stall for time until I can get close enough to attack. And this is all just from a branch that occurred when I fucked up a QTE. There’s also another moment where you can stumble across something you’re not meant to, finding yourself in a life-or-death confrontation with a completely different threat… or you can get what you need and get out without triggering that branch of the scene, your character not even having an idea of the bullet they just dodged. On a scene-by-scene level, a lot of the way the game constructs its interactive narrative is honestly pretty awesome, and I really loved looking up a lot of individual moments afterwards and seeing just how many different outcomes I could’ve gotten.

I’m also fond of how this game styles itself after detective noir, yet at the same time avoids the pitfalls I’ve seen other noirs trudge into. From the persistent heavy rain backdropping the game no matter where you are in this nameless American city, to the drab, grey, muted colour scheme that avoids the perils of low saturation, the game wears an aesthetic and wears it well, providing a little throughline that helps to suggest its colour and tone. I’m in addition a fan of the way they used mo-cap: not merely just to capture the actor's likeness and such, but also to choreograph many of the QTE action sequences. And not only are they pretty well-choreographed in their own right (they’re clear, they have a bit of slapstick style, you can easily tell what’s happening) but I love how seamless they feel with the many ways they can go. Every action by a bad guy, every action by you can succeed or fail based on the appropriate QTE, yet never at any point did the editing feel choppy or unable to handle a particular combination of wins and losses, providing an overall sequence that’s fairly unique in terms of how it specifically shakes out yet still flows without much interruption.

Unfortunately, before any of that, the first thing you get to experience is just how awfully the game plays. I’m not sure what exactly possessed David Cage to put tank controls in his interactive narrative but good god are they a mismatch. As opposed to moving via tilting the control stick, doing that merely has your character tilt their head in that direction, and you must instead hold down R2 to actually have your character move. This makes things so much more cumbersome than they need to be, between having your characters get caught on objects, getting stuck between camera angles, and in general having a hard time getting to the precise place they need to be to interact with something. The quicktime events… are better and also worse. On default they’re fine, even if oftentimes it’s really hard to see them given the way they fly around (and behind) things in the environment. Other times they don’t fare as well: there’s this one specific type of QTE you have to do which effectively requires you to pretzel your hands across the controller in a way that's so uncomfortable to hold for an extended period. Anything that requires using the Playstation Move controls isn’t exactly great. You’re told to physically move the controller down but because up/down are reversed (and this isn’t changeable) you're actually meant to move the controller up. You’re told to move the controller up and then you get in position to do so and then suddenly you pass the QTE without even trying. You’re told to shake the controller and you have to do it for so long that it could honestly qualify as a form of exercise. Legitimately by the end the motion sensors were auto-succeeding QTEs without any input on my part, which was great when I was trying to get somewhere specific but the game instead pulled me away from it over and over again. I’m honestly a fan of how long the QTE action sequences go on for — they’re the type of endurance test I think works fairly well, imo — but as a whole, this game does not control well. At best it’s stiff and clunky, and at points feels physically painful to have to interface with.

The story also has some pretty major problems. Amongst other, more minor things (this city apparently has at least four separate serial killers) the overall mystery... feels rather slipshod, at points. The game directly lies to you at several points regarding the identity of the Origami Killer, and while that’s not something I hate in theory, the game doesn’t have nearly enough grace or proper consideration to pull a twist like that off. There are little moments that you can point at, in hindsight, but as the game actively goes through with the reveal and flashes back to all the things the culprit did throughout the story, many of the things you see are either things you, the player, never actually got to see, or actively plays a completely different scene to the one you saw, leaving it feeling like the story was actively trying to trick you for the sake of its twist as opposed to providing you any sort of clues or natural progression (and, at the same time, bringing into question why the culprit would’ve done certain things the way they did if they were the culprit the whole time). The game will assume you’ve gone down branches you never actually took, with Madison referring to events that she wasn’t there for, having the contact information for somebody she never meets depending on certain events, and, at one point, being whispered the identity of the killer, reacting in shock… despite, due to what was likely a cut interaction, the killer being somebody Madison has never met before.

And honestly, you can tell that certain plot elements were cut mid-development, yet the vestiges are still present, and leave quite a lot of plot points that never conclude or get expanded on. Ethan explicitly has visions, gets teleported across the city, gets sent into psychic realms, and it’s brought up that maybe he’s not fully in control of himself… and the moment this is addressed as a problem is the last time it’s ever brought up, apparently because they wanted to excise all supernatural elements from the mystery (yet still keep the sci-fi sunglasses?), meaning there’s this whole aspect of the plot that just ends up going nowhere. The game keeps track of how many inches the titular Heavy Rain reaches in every new scene (just like Indigo Prophecy did by showing the temperature continually dropping) but this doesn’t amount to anything, it’s just some background detail that this city is receiving continuous, unending, apocalyptic amounts of rain while everybody runs around and tries to find this one serial killer. Jason and Shaun were aged up from 4/5 to 10/11… yet still act like they’re the former, making it really feel as if this game doesn’t know how children act. There was meant to be a whole backstory beat where Madison is trying to live with her memories of being a journalist for the Iraq war, but then this is never expounded upon, so Madison just has her first scene be this dream sequence of being stalked and attacked by two men in her home, which, speaking of, it’s kind of incredible how literally every scene Madison forces her into some archetype: either being subservient to a man, or being subjected to some sort of sexualized violence. She goes from potential assault victim to being Ethan’s wetnurse to being Ethan’s wetnurse again to potential torture victim to being forced to strip at gunpoint (and of course the way the game frames this is very classy) to very suddenly becoming Ethan’s love interest and giving the player a fucking incredible QTE sex scene. The very first scene she’s in you can interact with a clothesrack and then very suddenly she takes her clothes off and has a full-on shower scene. And meanwhile, unless you look at something rather specific in that same segment you don’t even get to know that she’s a journalist until the game’s almost over. She at least manages to be the main driver of the plot during the endgame — and manages to do so without the game relegating her into some sexist trope, barring her potential endings — but god, is the road to get there so Frank Miller-coded. And this isn’t even getting into the game’s two black characters.

Something that struck me is that the audio quality is, uh, quite bad. And this is from somebody a bit too hard of hearing to notice stuff like this. Oftentimes I’d find that the music, or the titular heavy rain would overpower everything else in the mix, making it impossible to hear anything the characters were saying unless you turned the volume down. The mic quality — particularly for the kids — is rather spotty. Every time I listened in on a character’s thoughts I legitimately thought something was wrong with my setup because it sounds so rough: the echo effect is so loud and tinny and the same channel as the unaltered line and it legitimately feels like the line is playing twice at once instead of merely being an echo filter. And this doesn’t even get into the voice acting. Most of the cast seem to be British or otherwise European playing Americans and it really shows. Everybody seems to be in a perpetual state of fighting with their accent. There are pretty consistent intonation issues across the board: nobody pronounces “origami” consistently, or even correctly. There are a couple of decent performances among the muck — Madison pretty consistently does a good job, Norman tries his best despite being the most hamstrung by accent issues — but a lot of the other performances either strike me as either… bad direction or screen actors not quite being used to motion capture/voice acting. People meme the whole ‘press X to Jason’ thing but it’s clear that there’s some sort of miscommunication between intent and execution: the direction was evidently ‘call for your son’ but absent context it feels more like Ethan’s trying to get Jason to set the table more than he is desperately trying to find his son in the middle of the crowd. So many performances feel kinda apathetic or robotic or like they have a really bad cold, including the two main characters guaranteed to make it to the end. It’s very funny that, among other things, this game mostly predates the trend of using non-voice actors in voice roles (at least for video games — Aladdin and Shrek had long pushed voice actors out of film roles) because it showcases a lot of the pitfalls that doing so can lead into, not to mention all the other, persistent issues with this game’s audio.

…It feels weird, in the end, to place this lower in rank than the two other Quantic Dream games I’ve played thus far. If, in part, because of what Heavy Rain has going for it. As opposed to Beyond: Two Souls, which plays it rather boring except for the parts that maybe don’t stand out for the better, or Indigo Prophecy, which honestly reads like David Cage got concussed halfway into writing it, Heavy Rain does a decent amount well. It builds up a tone, its action sequences are well choreographed especially considering how many permutations of them are present, and it’s really cool to see just how its choice-and-consequence is structured on a scene-by-scene basis. It’s a pity, then, that all these good parts stuck in an overall package that… struggles, between its awful control scheme, its poorly edited mystery, the rough audio quality and how David Cage really needs to drink Respect Women Juice. Sure, compared to everything else, and considering its place in history, Heavy Rain has a lot I’m personally willing to bat for, but under the deluge, after the storm, when the rivers and the creeks have burst their banks and dealt irreversible damage to the ecosystem… it’s rather difficult to care about the water amongst the mud. 3/10.

The first Nitrome game I ever played! Not for long, though. I'm fairly sure when I found the site I didn't even beat the first level of this before bouncing onto Skywire and Frost Bite, and now, having actually gone through it for the first time… maybe it was for the best that past me didn’t. The core of the game is that it’s a collectathon platformer with a main mechanic of jumping from planet to planet — the gravitational pull and the traversal through the landscape almost make the game feel like a traditional side-scrolling platformer… except that platforms, in this case, are circular, and centre gravity around them as you jump. While it starts well enough, the game starts to show its warts as it goes along. Individual levels veer loooooong — like, 5-7 minutes just to complete it — and not for good reasons: most of what you do after the halfway point is just stand around waiting for planets to come near you, or stand around on moving planets waiting for another go to try and the one star you need to get to complete the level. This could be bearable… if dying didn’t send you riiiiiight to the beginning, forcing you to do the entire process from step one each time. This is even worse given how finicky the platforming can be, or how cycles can sometimes work out that sometimes there’s no way to escape taking damage and the fact that the player jumps upon taking damage can randomly undo progress or immediately lead to more damage and, as a whole, this game… does not feel polished. Or particularly fun to play, after a point. Wouldn’t call it the worst so far, but for the first game I ever played from this company, for the game that, however indirectly, led me to obsessively follow the website (and, in a way, led me to become as active on the internet as I am today)… man, past me could’ve done better.

do have to shout out the music tho

This was solid! What I think I appreciate most is how the game's tone can just completely turn on a dime. While for the most part, the story plays off the humour of its kooky, slightly exaggerated characters bickering with each other, the horror aspect of the game can suddenly rear its head and produce sections that feel genuinely stressful to play — hearing your friends slowly die over the radio as your hazmat suit slowly runs out of oxygen. The plot starts out mundane enough, where you and your friends seek a way out of a hospital while also trying to cure yourself from the various viruses you catch, but out of nowhere, near the end, it just becomes absolutely unhinged in a way that kinda has to be seen to be believed. I liked the adventure game mechanics, too, even if I was happy to have a walkthrough for most of it: the first-person linear hallways, the mostly sparse sound design, and the empty, almost decrepit landscapes do a lot to characterize the hospital you're trying to escape, and the varied time-limit mechanics do a lot to make the player hurry a bit as they try and solve inventory puzzles. I'm a bit less sure about how slowly you plod as you walk back and forth between areas (even if it does, admittedly, add something to the tension) and the controls as a whole feel... finicky, with how sometimes you have to walk in circles or attempt something several times for the game to continue, but as a whole I had fun with this! It perhaps wasn't my favourite thing in the world to play, but as an experience I definitely appreciated what it brought to the table, both in terms of its specific atmosphere (and how it could play with tension) and in terms of just how entertaining it was to watch unfold.

Garten of Banban 3 is the best Garten of Banban so far. Whether that speaks to actual quality, or merely just being the tallest dwarf… okay, definitely the latter, but it at least made me question that to myself for a couple of minutes, and that says something. And not just about how it’s easy to overrate things when they exceed your expectations. The game is actually playable: unlike the previous games, all I had to do were to change some of the settings on PC and it ran fine the whole way through, and to be honest I probably could’ve gotten away with having them on high if it weren’t for me being paranoid that something was going to be all fucked up later. Many of the sections you go through feel improved as well: they’re not just killboxes that seek to make you reload as many times as possible, they’re attempts at setpieces. They’re clear, distinct moments with puzzles that, at times, can be loosely fun/satisfying to try and solve. The game’s also fairly decent at evoking stress — making the player fret as they try and solve the current section, making them dread what’s coming up — even if… it’s perhaps not quite in the way that was initially intended.

Because, while it’s certainly better than its predecessors, that still doesn’t mean it’s anything approaching good. The mission statement of this game, like Garten of Banban II, is still to stall for time in hopes of getting over the Steam refund threshold, it’s just that the developers are far more benign about it this time. Honestly it’s kind of funny to see just how blatant they are about it: the long pauses between lines of dialogue, the stretched-out gondola rides between each of the major areas, the way the game will try and randomly hide things like switches or items from plain sight, or how there are points where the game makes you jump off a surface to grab an item or hit a switch and you have to wrestle against the game to be able to actually hit it, it’s loosely a marvel to see how the game will stretch itself out next. There’s this one corridor where you have to open, like, eight doors in a row before you actually reach the next room. There’s another part directly copy/pasted from Garten of Banban II. I think my personal favourite is when the game tells you that the guy you’re looking for is on another part of the floor, but that there’s a BAD GUY on the same part of the floor you’re on and that you’re going to need to deal with him if you want to leave… only for you to immediately be told to leave and go to a different section of the floor in order to deal with him. It’s clear that these are all just excuses to extend the length of the game. And it’s also clear that the chops aren’t there to create an internal justification for any of itself, or to stitch together all these disparate sections into a coherent whole. But at the very least it’s much more friendly than II’s reliance on cheap deaths and extremely lengthy runs between checkpoints (even if there were sections that veered wayyyyyyyyyyyy longer than felt necessary or fun), and while there’s not quite a narrative structure, the way the map splits itself off into four distinct sections at the very least gives the player an indication of how far they are through the game, and, for better or worse, how close they are to the end.

I mentioned in my review for II that I did have loose hopes this game would be an improvement, based on what seemed like a capacity for humour combined with an inclination that the game started getting a bit more in on the joke from this point onward. Tragically, I was wrong on that: while there is inherent value in the voice acting, the limp attempts at jumpscares, and just how blatantly the game pads itself out, its attempts at actively leaning into this fall rather flat. Primarily because it manifests in spouting fanbase in-jokes far past the point where it initially could’ve been cute. In particular, the game loves to have Banban mention eating pancreases — a reference to the first game, where the game attempts to have its seemingly friendly aesthetics turn sinister by having a mural say “sharing is caring! Your pancreas is mine!” It was ridiculed, so the devs tried to do it ironically, but in the kind of way that mostly just kills the joke: especially when there’s a robot you have to push that spouts off a line about pancreases and another in-joke like ten times in as many seconds. The humour also veers… a bit long for its own good: the oft-mentioned car scene manages to hit some loosely absurdist beats before it… keeps going without much new material, only choosing to end about double the length it probably should’ve been. There’s one minor beat I thought was cute — a moment where the game tries to sandbag you in a way that’s honestly rather charming — but as a whole… man if this is the developer’s way of leaning in on the joke and trying to laugh with the people playing the game… I can’t really say I’m looking forward to that aspect anymore. I’m rather disappointed, honestly.

And overall… okay, yeah, it’s certainly an improvement, and maybe that, for a second, confused my brain into thinking “wait, is this really that bad? I don’t hate it, honestly,” but having gone through the whole thing, and having a couple of hours to put it all into perspective… it might be the least bad, but that doesn't make it any less bad. While it’s perhaps this series at its most playable, so far, it’s now gained an additional problem in that while its attempts at crafting a serious horror experience are ineffective as to cross the line into comedy, its newfound attempt at leaning into that comedic aspect falls far, far from the point where it could’ve worked. Given that I’m probably at this point committed to going through the rest of the series, though, I’ll at least take my blessings where I can find them: if this is the bar, the general structure, the way it’s going to pad itself out going forward, then I can’t imagine I’m gonna have that bad a time going forward. 3/10.

What I tend to like about puzzle games like this is how they can often be a glimpse into the thought process of their developers, where you have to get to know them and think on their wavelength if you want to get through, and IMO this game excels at that. Its particular focus is on code-cracking — finding keywords in a sea of gibberish and using that to decrypt and access further puzzles — and all the different little languages that have historically been used to hide secret messages. I really like how the game always manages to iterate in how it applies codes to crack: for how… surprisingly large the game is it almost never repeats itself, each puzzle feeling new and at some points incredibly creative (to the point where I absolutely don’t wanna give examples since I’d be actively spoiling the game if I did so). I’m also really into how the game manages to wrap around itself in terms of progression: sometimes it takes a Metroidvania-ish approach and requires you to reach a later puzzle before you can solve an earlier puzzle. Sometimes an earlier puzzle becomes a tool in itself to solve a later puzzle. Sometimes you think you’re solving something else entirely and then when you uncover part of a picture you’ll see the symbol that signifies you have to translate something into binary and you’ll sit there, for a second, as what you have to actually do all begins to click together in your head. Most of all, it’s surprisingly variant: various different skills are tested, you’re not going to eat shit the whole game just because you’re bad at one particular thing. Not to mention how low-key great the graphic design is (I love how when you start up the game the circle behind the puzzle select screen piecharts your completion percentage) and how neat it is to see the story slowly uncover through all the emails you read and files you decrypt.

I will say, though, I’m nooooot a big fan of the in-built hint system, mostly because of its at-a-lot-of-points questionable worth compared to how much time you have to sink into it. The hint system works on a timer: if you want a hint for a puzzle, you have to wait a minute to get it. A second hint, two minutes. Your last hint, three. It’s an interesting approach, and I like how it theoretically encourages you to give something else a try while you wait for the game to drop you a hint, but the quality of the hints you get varies wildly. Sometimes they were the mental kick I needed to solve the puzzle, but a lot of the time I had to wait up to five minutes to be told about the part of the puzzle I’d already figured out. This… bottlenecks you hard, especially when there’s a puzzle where you’re immediately like ???: you spend a lot of time staring at the game, trying to see if you can brute force your brain into figuring it out, while the timer ticks down endlessly for a hint you don’t even know will actually help. This is compounded by how the game also thinks, sometimes, that what it tells you is more comprehensive than it actually is. There’s one puzzle in the first quadrant where you have to translate every o and i in an email to part of a code, and, like… does that include capital letters? Does it include letters in the subject/date of the email? I put so many different variations in and not once got the actually correct answer, and honestly I still don’t know what exactly counted, or whether there was an o or i I didn’t see. There were a lot of puzzles like that, and, consequently, a lot of puzzles where I needed outside help to solve because what the game gave me didn’t feel like enough.

But aside from that, I liked this! It was fun, cerebral, surprisingly meaty, and it was honestly really cool to learn all about cyphers, and, consequently, how to solve some of the more common kinds. I recommend it! Juuuuust don’t play it all in one day. It’ll make your head spin. Literally. I marathoned it on and off for like eight hours and now wherever I look my vision spirals in on itself. It kinda hurts

this game is incredible what the fuck are you people on about

Like okay, yeah, this is very clearly the developer's fetish, but even as far as fetish games go it isn't that weird, or even that invasive on the general product — I've seen AAA games even as recent as this year do the femme-fatale-hip-sway-walk in a way that's far more blatantly sultry. Yeah, it's... kinda shovelware-y, and anything enemies can do to you is negated by just... strafing, but it's honestly a little fun just mindlessly shooting, and the survival modes honestly do great at varying the terrains and seeing just how far you can go when the screen is flooded with dudes. Most of all I just love this game's vibe: from the shitposty tone of the cutscenes, to the oversaturated lighting, the absolutely garish, almost deep-fried colour scheme, and the pointless jump and dodge roll, it's very clear that this game isn't really taking itself seriously. And it manages to strike a good balance, in that vein, where it's ostensibly a bit goofy and bad and yet the game isn't trying too hard to lean into the joke. It's a good game to laugh with. And it's fun in general. I'm almost not being ironic here. I don't care what anybody says. I'm buying this on Playstation and I'm going to get the Platinum trophy. Just you watch me.

So, so close to being an early standout for Nitrome. Genuinely a ton of fun, at least up until a certain point. You control a swatter, there’s a bunch of bugs crawling across the screen, and you have to swat as many of them as you can before time runs out. It’s a simple concept, but there’s so much variety in the things you’re asked to do. One level requires you to use the swatter to keep a beetle in the air for 30 seconds. Another gives you precisely one chance to hit a slug falling from the top of the screen… but doesn’t tell you precisely when it will, leaving you in anticipation of when and where it’s gonna fall. One tells you to swat a mere two flies… each inside fly traps, requiring you to sneak in and bolt out lest your swatter get eaten. Levels are plentiful, but short: if you don’t think a particular mechanic/enemy type isn’t a winner then you at least don’t have to stick with it for long… unless it happens to be one of the ones the game chooses to bring back. It’s fun, it hits some good arcadey beats, and the pixel art is so pretty. I was honestly so close to really liking it… but god is the difficulty curve so, so rough. The first two worlds are fun, the third is… rough (do you want to have to click on a stag beetle 150 times in 15 seconds?), but otherwise fine, then the final world amps the difficulty up wayyyyyyy too much. Some are doable with some effort, some become much harder than they should merely due to the presence of the health bar/timer, a couple honestly felt a bit like crapshoots when I did enough for the game to count it as a win, but two levels in particular are so hard as to be genuinely impossible. And, like, that’s not just me talking: I looked up guides to see how others did it and every walkthrough I saw had whoever did it complain specifically about these two levels. And, like man, I really wanna recommend this game but I’m not sure I really could if I had to futz with Flash just so the game could be beatable. It’s such a shame, because I think the difference between this being where it is and this being where I’d want it to be is merely a case of tweaking some values to make the ridiculous stuff less ridiculous, but as is… man it was so close. Close enough that I still like it, honestly, but not enough to truly bat for it.

If Alone in the Dark is the first survival horror game, then Alone in the Dark 2 is the first survival horror sequel to take a more action-oriented approach. The difference is immediately evident in how each game begins. In Alone in the Dark, you’re in an attic, there are things from outside trying to get in, and you have to race to block the windows off before they break through and drag you away. In Alone in the Dark 2 you’re plonked right next to a zombie with a gun and you have to karate chop him to death before he shoots you. While the intro for Alone in the Dark eased you into exploring the mansion, Alone in the Dark 2 gives way to… what almost feels like an action setpiece, rushing down the driveway to the mansion and trying to push a statue out of the way before the guards can shoot you. If Alone in the Dark’s first major area gave you an indication of the ins and outs of combat and how the game wasn’t afraid of being cheap with traps and ambushes, the hedge maze that begins Alone in the Dark 2 tells you three key things: every space you go through is going to be rather tight. Enemies are constant. If you want to get past, and get through, you’re going to have to engage with the game’s combat.

y’know

the combat

the really good combat

…

In my review for the first Alone in the Dark, I talked about how the combat system was fairly easily the worst part of the game. You’re beholden to this system where you have to learn your weapon’s moveset and learn the timings and windups all while enemies can just walk up to you and stunlock you to death, and it becomes really clear really quick that unless you want to spend a lot of health and resources for diminishing returns you need to run from and past enemies whenever possible. For Alone in the Dark 2, it’s back, and even worse. Not because combat is now the only thing you ever really do, but because instead of enemies needing to close the gap (giving you your one opportunity to safely stunlock them), now they all have guns. All the melee weapons you get are functionally useless (except for the endgame, where they’re still useless but also you can’t use any of your guns) because trying to close the gap and use them will get you shot, which then forces you into using your own guns, which are just as bad. You need to figure out where to point so that you’re pointing at the enemy, which the cinematic fixed camera angles don’t help with. This is something the AI never has to worry about, so oftentimes you lose health trying to orient your gun so that it’s actually aimed in the correct direction. It says something that the best way to go through things is to cheese the enemies into shooting a wall between you and them, instead.

And it’s required. Not just necessarily “the door will only open once the enemy is dead” but in more subtle ways, like an item needed for progression only dropping once you kill a specific enemy. Problem is, you don’t know what enemies are the ones that drop the things you need, or, even if they do drop something, whether the thing you get will actually take you in a direction that progresses you through the game or whether it just leads to more lore or a “”””””””better””””””” weapon. This is even worse when you consider resource scarcity. More specifically, ammo scarcity: your constant need for ammo because guns are the only thing worth using far eclipses the ammo the game gives you. You’re perpetually running low, a problem that’s made even worse by how you’re always going to miss at least one or two shots because the perspective is so fucked. Oftentimes it feels like you need to savescum just to see if you can get through a fight using slightly less ammo, or losing slightly less health, or losing significantly more health because you were forced to use melee, which… even when you’re meant to use it it’s still so clunky and rough to deal with. There’s more than one segment where there are tendrils guarding things that’ll damage you if you get close, that can only be hurt by melee attacks… which usually move you forward as you do so, putting you into the damage zone with the oftentimes borked fixed camera perspective making it unclear whether you managed to land a hit on the tendrils or not. The endgame is meant to be a series of swordfights, but it’s more like a series of you using the same move over and over again to lock the opponent in place, spamming it for what feels like minutes until the enemy finally forgets to block, with absolutely no indication as to whether something was a hit or how much HP your opponent has left. Overall the combat is baaaaaaad. Bad bad bad, and the increased focus on it in this game honestly singlehandedly tanks it.

Which is a bit of a shame, because I like a good deal of what this game is attempting. I love the setting: the cloudy, early evening sky, the hedge maze, how you get to run around (and climb) a pirate ship, the fact that this game, of all games, is set during Christmas (and you spend a significant amount of it in a Santa suit)… oftentimes I feel like survival horror games tend to lean onto the same kinds of settings — primarily, those popularized by genre codifiers like Resident Evil or Silent Hill — so it’s really neat to see how even just set dressing can make what’s otherwise a fairly archetypical setting (a mansion) feel so fresh and unique compared to other takes. I like the focus on the background lore — the pirates, their curse, how that informs both the gameplay and sets the story in motion — but even regardless I’m kind of into the shift into having a bit of an active plot: characters you meet along the way, a focus on what’s happening over what happened fifty years ago. There’s also a stealth section that I liked well enough, and not necessarily just because it does away with combat for a merciful, brief moment in time and instead focuses on direct helplessness, needing to stay out of the sight of enemies, impede them when they come after you, and take them out with indirect means. It’s fun, and it does a fun job at repurposing the areas you’ve otherwise fought your way through the rest of the game, transplanting them into a different context and showcasing a little bit of versatility in how they’re designed.

None of that really makes up for how rouuuuuugh the rest of the game feels to play, though. Entirely because of how action-focused this game is: you're saddled with awful combat from the moment you start, and aside from one brief, merciful segment where the game doesn’t allow you to fight back, it never gets better. Only worse, once it becomes fully clear just how clunky the mechanics are. The original Alone in the Dark, despite suffering from the exact same issue, did well to nearly turn that into a strength, the sense of fight or flight, that question of whether entering combat is actually worth it directly inspiring the games that define survival horror today. It’s… certainly not the best game in the world, sure, but it’s still solid, and still worth taking a look at, both on its own merits and as the progenitor of the genre. Alone in the Dark 2, on the other hand, aside from some quirks, and the novelty of its setting… I feel is best left forgotten. 3/10.

LIMBO starts with you playing as a small child wandering through a forest, braving the many horrors within in pursuit of a mysterious something. After playing the dev’s later effort, INSIDE, going through this game was… interesting, mostly in terms of what seems similar and what the dev team seemed to learn in the years succeeding. For a horror platformer, I wouldn’t really say there’s much of an atmosphere: as opposed to less tangible things sound or music design, most of what you encounter here is rather concrete, from the simple yet evocative enemy designs and the rather brutal death animations that manage to shine even if the monochrome, silhouetted artstyle does a bit more harm than good. Most interesting is how the game seems to draw a bit from masocore performers. You’re expected to die a lot, and generally not for fair reasons. From random traps in the ground, puzzles and mechanics you can only intuit in the heat of the moment, to points where you don’t know what exactly is going to happen, one thing is made clear: this world is cruel, and it’s mostly cruel for cruelty’s sake. It’s certainly… bleak — and there’s never any point of relative respite in the middle of it — but it does provide a… relatively unique thematic throughline, one that characterizes the game even in lack of a more abstract atmosphere. I wouldn’t necessarily say that I liked this as much as INSIDE, but as one of the first post-Braid-artsy-indie-puzzle-platformers, it’s fairly solid, and an interesting look at what the landscape of the early indie game boom was li- wait what do you mean there’s still two thirds of the game left to go?

…

…

LIMBO is a game that outstays its welcome. Before I played it, most of what I’d seen of it — most of the gameplay footage in YouTube videos mentioning the game, however brief — was content that was mostly in the first hour. I was under the impression that it mostly took place in the forest, that the giant spider you ran from was a threat that followed you throughout the game, and that finally managing to turn the tables on it represented the climax, the end of the game soon to follow. In one way, I was right: the game as I knew it did end, and the remaining two hours felt like something else entirely.

The ‘horror’ aspect of the game disappears almost completely — perhaps a consequence of how it was only held up by the more concrete aspects mentioned above: when those are gone, there’s nothing really there to keep the mood up, or really make the game feel like anything. While there’s the occasional bit of grotesque design, or a slightly gnarly death animation, it feels like the game drops a lot of whatever thematic material it had to become a more generic puzzle platformer where you push boxes onto switches to open the door forward. New mechanics are introduced, but it feels like none of them really interact with each other or the general setting: you just suddenly come across machines that change the direction gravity operates and oops that’s the core game mechanic now. The masocore elements still exist within the platforming and some of the puzzles — this is a game where you’re expected to die a lot — but it never feels particularly charming or meaningful. While other 'impossible' platformers of the time, such as I Wanna Be The Guy or Cat Mario, were often defined by having a sense of humour in how they chose to pull the rug under the player, intending to bait a reaction or at least let the player laugh with the game, LIMBO doesn't particularly treat your deaths with any gravitas: you fail, you wait through the wayyy long death animation, then you reload at the checkpoint. No real surprise, no real reaction other than 'okay, well, I'm dead now.' I guess ‘things are dark and bleak and also fuck you you die’ is at least a loose theme, but on its own, it doesn’t feel like enough. And without anything to really back it up beyond the direct game elements, it doesn’t feel like it coalesces into anything, just a loosely unpleasant undertone that forgot to leave with everything else the game had going for it.

Which is not to the game’s benefit, because rather than just becoming a rather standard puzzle platformer, it instead becomes a rather standard puzzle platformer which is really, really frustrating to play. This mostly comes down to what feels like a disconnect between these two separate things, where progress is determined by you figuring out all the moving pieces and solving the puzzle to find a way forward, while the masocore elements try to make that as obtuse and annoying as possible. It’s like having a jigsaw in front of you except your cat or your baby brother keeps taking pieces from you and hiding them around the house: you’re often missing something that’s the key to actually making progress, and the game makes a point at actively hiding that element from you. Say, a puzzle where it turns out you need a second box, when that second box is in a completely different area, past an enemy, in a place that does not seem like there’s anything there and in a game where you’ve never before this point had to go left instead of right.

Not to mention how tight and uncompromising a lot of the timings and solutions are. There’s a puzzle where you have to use a minecart to get onto a rail track, which you have to run across before the minecart presses a button that electrifies the ground below you. There is no wiggle room: you have to find the exact place on the slope to jump onto the minecart, both high enough on the slope so that you have enough time to run across the rail, but low enough that it doesn’t pick up speed and hit the button prematurely. The track is long enough that anything other than the exact sweet-spot means you don’t get there in time and you die. There’s no rubric to really tell where the exact place to put it is, whether a failure was because you put it too high or too low, you just have to brute force the puzzle, dying over and over again, until you somehow intuit or guess what you actually have to do. And after four or five puzzles beforehand that are exactly like that, it’s hard not to get sick of it.

Which, like, maybe that’s what the game intends. Maybe it’s meant to feel bleak and empty in a rather charmless way. Which, like, okay, sure, but that doesn’t then make it all that fun or interesting to interface with. Nor does it make what’s there… feel particularly deep or meaningful. Which is a shame, because the first hour still holds up. Even if it didn’t quite compare to INSIDE, it was a decently effective little platformer that worked well to blend horror with masocore elements to create something rather evocative. What follows feels much less interesting, much less purposeful, and something that I frankly got tired of playing long before I reached the end. 4/10.

I didn’t know it was possible for one game to ape from this many different eras of indie horror. Egghead Gumpty has it all: from the page key collecting gameplay of Slender: The Eight Pages, the jumpscares on-fail (which make you stop in your tracks half a second before they happen so they’ll never take you off guard) a la Five Nights at Freddy’s, and a procedurally generated setting that totally isn’t The Backrooms you guys, it’s clear that this game is a patchwork chimera of much more trendsetty horror games, and one that… is certainly not the sum of its parts. Even what here that’s original isn’t exactly functional: the titular Egghead Gumpty’s main mechanic is that he’ll appear somewhere in the room you’re in, and you’ll have to find him before a timer runs out, which works when it happens when you’re in a room, but when you’re in any of the corridors — which are all rather long and undefined in shape given the procedural generation — he can spawn far enough away from you that you have no clue where he is and can’t really get an inkling of his location before he kills you. There’s this baby thing that… I think you’re meant to play Red Light Green Light with, but the mechanics around it are so unclear and I died every time I dared to try figure it out. The procedural generation, I feel, does more harm and good here: even other than RNG bullshit where you lose resources/can’t find the places you need to go I feel like it’s hard to feel invested into figuring out your surroundings and figuring out the optimal way to collect everything when the floors change every time you die or even when the floors sometime delete themselves and trap you inside a dead end. I tried this for about 90 minutes, sometimes making some progress before getting fucked over by the puppet baby or Gumpty making me find him in one of the huge hallways. Maybe if I put in some effort I could complete it… but also I didn’t really feel much of a need to. I feel like faffing about and getting killed for 90 minutes really got me to the yolk of the experience here.

Man, I was legitimately interested in this game. It came up on new and trending on Steam back in 2021 and I saw the blurb and the artstyle and I was immediately like ‘okay, yeah, I’m sold, I’ll play this at some point’ and then that point finally came and… God what the fuck even was this? It’s allegedly a game that talks about Serious Issues such as mental health and school shootings but it’s treated like a giant shitpost? And, like, yeah, I know that’s Gen Z humour, but as someone who’s part of Gen Z and who’s invested in both of these topics… having a guest speaker suddenly repeat “my ass itches” super bass boosted for twenty seconds while everybody in the room t-poses does not make me think you’re taking these subjects seriously, my dude. Even beyond that, the writing isn’t great. Everything feels so hamfisted and not like a real teacher or student. The game tries to show how isolation and bullying can affect people but can’t figure out how to actually do that without giving the player multiple choices where both options are just “participate in this dude’s bullying.” The game seems to think that being mute makes you unable to communicate at all and it's mostly just an excuse for the main character to stand there, silently, to try and show a message about how staying silent in the face of bullying only perpetuates it. Characters appear and talk to you and loosely seem like they're important and then they just disappear from the script and never get mentioned again. There’s also just… a werewolf? For some reason? And you and the werewolf just go flying through the sky like it’s Robot Unicorn? Whatever... it was trying to go for with that whole thing kind of lost me immediately. I’m still into the… low-fi, minimalist pixel art (even if it’s bathed in visual filters that are all painful to look at), and I can… loosely tell that the developer Tried and does care about these topics, but God, for something I was unironically interested in before I played it… fucking hell what a letdown. 2/10.

One rather noticeable thing about the first Fatal Frame is that its localization... has issues, at least from my perspective. It’s immediately evident, whether it’s how every single voice actor sounds like they’ve overdosed on cold medicine and really could be doing more important things right now, or the subtle grammar errors — tense, plural conflicts, that thing thing in optical illusions where the last word of one line is repeated as the first word of the next line except that here, here, apparently, it's done completely unknowingly. A friend informed me before I started playing that I’d absolutely need a walkthrough, and while at first I chalked that up to general survival horror esotericness, soon upon starting the game I happened to stumble across a puzzle that was… completely untranslated. I was meant to press four out of ten buttons, on a circular structure, with an epitaph telling me to look at a note I’d collected which had a bunch of numbers highlighted in red. Presuming, maybe, that this was some sort of clock (albeit, one which used specific kanji for the numbers I’d never seen before) I tried to input the numbers roughly where they’d be on a Western clock, only for that to be incorrect. I decided that maybe this was why I was meant to have a walkthrough, looked the answer up, only to find that… I was correct. It was a clock. The buttons on the interface did represent numbers. I just happened to lack the cultural context to know that this specific clock… ran anticlockwise. Something that might have been much easier to figure out had any of the elements of the puzzle itself been translated.

If I were to hazard a guess as to why the localization effort turned out the way it did, I’d say… it’s because Fatal Frame leans far more into Japanese culture and folklore than any of its contemporaries. While most survival horror games up to this point — Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and Parasite Eve, among others — primarily took inspiration from Western horror movies, and to evoke this were usually set in some facsimile of the USA, Fatal Frame goes for… something loosely opposite. Rather than taking from the West, Fatal Frame draws from within, and as opposed to looking at at-the-time contemporary media — though the late 90s/early 2000s boom in J-Horror could’ve played a part — the game draws from local myth and folklore: specifically, the idea of the yūrei, figures analogous but not quite the same as the western idea of ghosts. Given all that, it can be seen that Fatal Frame is not quite equivalent to its brethren, and to approach it with the same treatment as something more naturally Western is a recipe for losing something in translation. And with glaring issues like the untranslated puzzles, and with stuff like, say, the kagome dolls which require cultural context to understand their implementation in-game, it makes other issues — such as the tense conflicts, or the voice acting — not quite as able to blend in as they might’ve for, say, the first Resident Evil. I’d like to note, for the record, that this doesn’t necessarily impact my feelings on the game itself (perhaps, if I really wanted the true Fatal Frame experience I should’ve not dropped out of doing Japanese at school while I was in the middle of a downward spiral), it’s just a case where unless you happen to know the language or have the cultural context you are going to need a walkthrough to understand this game, even beyond some of the usual survival horror trappings.

You play, primarily, as a young girl named Miku Hinasaki, whose brother disappears while searching for his teacher inside the supposedly haunted Himuro Mansion. As her search to find him takes her inside the mansion, she finds that all the ghost stories she’s heard are real: the mansion is littered with yūrei of varying levels of hostility, and only through the use of the Camera Obscura — an antique polaroid camera passed down through Miku’s family — does she have a chance at fighting back against those with more hostile intentions. As she delves deeper, upgrading her camera, accessing new parts of the mansion, collecting recordings and writings of those left behind, it soon becomes clear that your role here extends far past finding your brother and his teacher. A curse has infected the Himuro Mansion for generations, haunting, killing, and assimilating all who enter it, and as you delve further and further into the past, it soon starts to become clear that all this circles around a failed ritual, and the spirit of the woman who was meant to perform it: a spirit who, soon enough, proceeds to place their eyes on you.

I think what I’d particularly like to praise is just how incredible this game is at atmosphere. There are just so many little things that come together and really make it shine as a horror experience. I love the way the plot unfolds: how it initially begins with the plot thread of finding your brother and meeting the people he was trying to look for, before each subsequent chapter unfurls back, generation by generation, coming up against everybody laid victim by the curse until you eventually manage to reach its source. I like a lot of the artstyle, both in terms of helping the game feel smooth to play — how it handles you needing to light up dark areas without it feeling like a low-saturation hellscape, how subtle the fog is at walling off/impeding visibility past a certain point, how (for being translucent) immediately noticeable the ghosts are against the background — and also stylistically: the monochrome colour scheme when you’re looking into the past and the curse is about to take somebody feels so distinct, and also feeds into a couple of particular plot details in a way that feels pretty clever. While I did mention the voice acting as a negative during my preamble, it’s really effective coming out of the many enemies you fight: the monotone, slightly distorted delivery does a lot to show the otherworldly, not-quite-human-anymore nature of the spirits you face. I love the way the mansion changes between chapters: how certain doors lock and unlock, how some areas restock or get new items, how encounters shift to different locations: you’ll be going through the same general areas for the whole game, but the context for why you do so, and the purposes of each room can change radically between chapters which makes it feel like a whole new map each time. I’ve mentioned before how oftentimes it’s all the little things working in tandem that can really tie a horror game together, and I think Fatal Frame is a standout example on that front: all these tidbits which are fairly neat on their own really do their job to coalesce and create something special.

What differentiates Fatal Frame most from its survival horror contemporaries — aside from its set dressing of Japanese folklore — is its combat system. As opposed to being some sort of experienced fighter, using conventional weaponry to take down physical foes, Miku’s foes are much less tangible, and only through perceiving and documenting them with the Camera Obscura can you dispel them: eventually, with the goal of exorcizing them entirely. You do this via controlling the camera in first person (as opposed to the third person fixed camera movement of the rest of the game), and, upon locating your ghost, keeping your focus on them to build up spiritual power until eventually snapping a picture of them, doing increasing damage based on the type of camera roll/ammo you use and how long you were able to charge up for. There are various ‘special’ types of shot that reward special circumstances — such as taking a photo of multiple enemies at once, taking a photo when they're as close as possible to the camera, and, most importantly, taking a photo of an enemy right as they attack you — by multiplying damage and briefly stunning the enemy, heavily encouraging patience and fishing for the perfect shot.

However, enemies also become more complicated over time, and often engage in tactics primarily built to make you lose track of where they are: teleporting, cloning themselves, and phasing into walls and the floor both to try and protect themselves and sneak up on you. There are different types of enemies, who all react differently to your camera, and it characterizes the core conceit of the gameplay fairly well, going up against the spirit of the same person throughout their many haunts until you’re finally able to exorcize them for good. It also helps to create rather frenetic moments as you progress through the game: where you as the player scurry around the room to try and find the enemy that just disappeared, and where positioning is vitally important, both to get a wide, open range so that enemies don’t get too far out of sight, and to make sure nothing can sneak up where you won’t be able to see them. I love combat systems that manage to become more complex over time without adding extra mechanics to the core system, and for the most part, Fatal Frame is able to hit a sweet spot where combat feels tense without actively feeling adverse to play.

(I also really liked the incidental non-hostile ghosts: the ones you specifically need to listen to cues to find, or the ones you have to snap a picture of fast before they disappear forever. While some of them seem especially “you have to know in advance when and where these guys are going to pop up,” in a way that encourages replaying the game or buying a guide, it’s a cute little extra thing that you can do throughout the game and does a lot to characterize the mansion and the curse infecting it: showing just how many people have fallen victim and become trapped inside the mansion forever)

I say “for the most part,” because unfortunately, past a certain point, the game really starts feeling adverse to play, particularly in terms of combat. Ghosts really start leaning on teleporting the moment you so much as move the camera in their direction, which makes combat this frustrating dance of just trying to find the enemy in hopes that maybe this time you can actually do some damage to them. This’d be maybe fine, in moderation, and if there was at least some variance it’d be more bearable, but from chapter 3 onwards the game is basically nothing but constant encounters with the same annoying enemies and it’s a sloooooooog. It also plays badly with a lot of your resource management: you have to make do with taking low-damage pictures to enemies, which means you have to take a lot of them to actually put an opponent down, all the while one hit from them takes nearly half your health bar. This means you have to scrounge around the mansion, hoping the game will drop you stuff you actually need instead of fuel for special skills you don’t use… but also if you dare walk off the beaten path you get punished with combat with a special ghost who embodies everything that makes combat really intolerable at this point, and who will almost certainly hit you before you leave the room (because for some reason Miku never really feels that much of a need to, say, get through a door fast when there's something chasing her), necessitating save scumming or even more scrounging. It’s miserable, especially since this combat happens in lieu of any other mode of progression. No more puzzles, no more trying to find new parts of the mansion: everything after this point is just the same combat encounters over and over again.

At the very least, though, most of what else I found compelling remained as such even when the direct gameplay took a nosedive: the slowly unfolding history of the Himuro Mansion, the immaculate atmosphere and artstyle that made simply traversing the mansion an enjoyable experience when I wasn’t getting nothin’ personnelled by a ghost monk, and my attempts to get snapshots of as many of the incidental ghosts as I could. Even if the at-first unique combat system eventually loses its sense of where on the line it falls between exciting and frustrating, nearly everything else really holds up, and, if not quite picture perfect, isn't washed out at all, even with all the things that work against it. 8/10.