what if… racism was bad? but what if… hating racism too much… was also bad? wish roger ebert was here to see this… he’d understand just how Important this game is

…I guess, on that point, it’s always interesting to me what games get put on a pedestal — what, according to Gamers, ‘proves’ that games can be art. Every few years it always seems like something comes out that’s immediately lauded for pushing the medium forward, for being more than just something where you press the buttons to run and jump, for really showing just what gaming can be… and they’re usually all triple-A western franchise titles, exorbitantly priced, and being touted as such by more mainstream publications — the ones that don’t generally cover games that don’t have a marketing budget or pre-existing hype behind them. No judgment towards any of those games, of course, I’ve yet to play any of them, but it seems as if the argument is more as to whether mainstream games can be art — whether or not we can make Roger Ebert a Gamer. There’s so many cool games out there that, to some extent have already proved what this medium is capable of, but to some extent, it's always been a measure of self-validation more than it’s ever been a desire to broaden one’s horizons. It’s kind of like those weird Gaylor Swift conspiracy theorists: why listen to an actual LGBT artist when I can instead pretend my favourite white woman actually stands for something? Why leave my comfort zone when I already have the validation I want?

What personally bugs me is that a lot of what gets pushed forward as 'prestige,' I feel, doesn’t truly take advantage of what the medium truly offers, or, as is often the case, are actively scared of letting you actually play the game. There are so many cool things you can do, so many ways you could use game mechanics or ludonarrative to illustrate or underline a thematic point, but so many of these Elevated games instead feel like they’re going for things that movies can already do, and I feel like that’s leaning in the wrong direction as to what can, honestly, feel profound. Just as an off-the-cuff example, the final choice of Ace Attorney: Justice For All asks whether you, as the defense, plead your client as guilty or innocent. Do you believe in protecting your client, or protecting the innocent? Do you exact (relative) mercy on somebody who’s wronged you? Or do you subject them to the monkey’s paw-esque fate they've more than had coming? Which of those is truly just? It’s not a choice that matters — the scene plays out the same regardless of what you pick — but in this sense the option you choose exposes something of you, the player: what you value, and what you, personally, have taken out of everything that’s just happened. You have to choose — the scene doesn’t move forward until you do — and in that sense, it's something that could only be done within an interactive medium: you are directly made to engage with the text, you are directly made to provide your own interpretation of its thematic content. BioShock Infinite does something similar within its first hour, and the question asked is just as profound: are you racist? Or are you not racist?

…I don’t think it’s really going to be possible to talk about BioShock Infinite without talking about… all that, huh?

sigh

I have to begin this with a disclaimer, I guess: I’m white, I don’t think I’m entirely equipped to be talking about this, but the guy who wrote this is also white so maybe, actually, I’m just as qualified to at least try. This game thinks it's making this grand, profound statement about how racism is bad — and how the ‘good old days’ of the U.S, as is the visual aesthetic of Columbia, was built on the abuse and discrimination of the non-whites and immigrants — yet fails to back that up at every turn. For as loudly as it says it, it doesn’t feel like it has much to actually say, with most of its observations feeling so so, surface level. What does the game define ‘racism’ as, anyway? Is it the mere act of an individual discriminating against another on the basis of their race, or is it the systemic act of providing opportunities and benefits to one group over others? Is this society meant to be based off of the pre-emancipation era of the United States, the ‘separate but equal’ segregation that preceded the civil rights movement, or one of the periods in-between? Is there anything that can be said about how white supremacy movements are still prevalent today? Is there anything worth mentioning in how almost all the enemies during the first half of the game are cops? I wouldn’t know: the game doesn’t seem particularly interested in actually going in-depth on the topic, feeling like it’s merely taking a brave stance of ‘racism was bad’ and expecting that to be enough.

And it’s frustrating because it often feels like the game is on the cusp of saying something actually potent… right before it veers away without fully committing to it. You start the game in a church, it becomes clear that Columbia is very much a fundamentalist state. You could maybe lean into how most fundamentalists will misquote or selectively take from the Bible to justify their bigotry, or maybe even go into how the church was often used to subjugate and control colonized peoples… or you could simply treat this the same way the racism is treated in general: very surface level, religious fundamentalism is bad because religious fundamentalism is bad and because using religious words like 'our prophet' and 'messiah' to surround your bad guy is subversive and creepy. Early on, after rescuing Elizabeth, you’re sent to a beach area, you get to mingle, and you learn that the segregation discriminates against the Irish, as well. You could use this to maybe go into the historical mistreatment of Ireland, maybe show how these fascist systems will keep moving the goalposts until those at the very top of their hierarchy remain… or you could just, like, never really bring it up again. That works too. Later on, you go into a museum, you find out that the justification for this discrimination is that the founder/prophet of Columbia lost his wife because the labor underclass rose up and killed her and this could be so fascinating and a window of the paradox in how fascist systems treat women: both as one of the defacto ‘inferiors’ to be subjugated… yet at the same time the madonna figure, whose innocence must be protected, and who through this comes the justification to commit atrocities against the other inferiors. The game is on the cusp of realizing this with Elizabeth — being locked up in a gilded cage, being forbidden from interacting with the outside world, yet also being a literal symbol, both the justification and continuation of this totalitarian system — and then this is all just thrown to the wayside because the story wants her to be Cute and Quirky. Every time this story stumbles on something it could actually say it decides it doesn’t feel like doing so. It wants credit for taking the stance it does but never actually wants to get its feet in the muck. And here I thought art was meant to alienate. Silly me.

(also… I feel like if you’re at least trying to condemn racism I don’t think it’s a great idea to have the only defined asian characters be speaking in broken English? again, white guy over here, I don’t want to make assumptions on things I don’t know well about, but, like, maybe not the time and place?)

I mean, I guess it’s trying to be anti-racist. I think that’s what it’s trying to be. I mean I’m not as confident as I was initially because holy shit does the game fucking swerve on its message right at the halfway point. See, by opposing the forces of Columbia, you eventually come into contact with a cabal of rebels seeking to overthrow this fascist system. You help them out (but… only because you’re forced to, Booker is rather ‘yeah whatever’ about basically everything other than Elizabeth), and by changing the timeline to give them GUNS you give them the means to meaningfully act out and rise up against their oppressors… to which the game immediately goes “oh no… this protest… is too violent… are these people really all that different from the slave owners?” And then suddenly the rebel leader goes “oh, by the way, something something you’re not the real you, you must die,” the game decides to show she’s actually The Bad Guy by having her try and murder a child, Elizabeth is made to kill her, and Booker’s response, verbatim, is “the only difference between [a racist, totalitarian system] and [trying to overthrow said racist, totalitarian system] is how you spell the name.” Maybe the Vox Populi should’ve just protested peacefully, ala MLK and Ghandi. Maybe we should’ve just voted out Hitler. And- and honestly what’s most wild for me is that this is how the game just fucking forgets that it’s about fascism and racism right after this. You watch Elizabeth shoot the only named black character in the game the rebel leader and the fallout of the scene is pressing F to reassure her that everything’s okay. The rest of the plot that follows is almost exclusively about time travel and alternate dimensions as opposed to anything regarding the rather delicate subject matter the game was attempting to handle earlier. The slavery of this one white woman is more important than the slavery of Columbia’s entire underclass. You shoot down rebel soldiers almost exclusively past this point and neither you nor the narrative bats an eye.

(addendum here: a friend pointed me towards BioShock Infinite’s Wikipedia page and I really just have to share this paragraph here because, like, what the fuck do you mean “the good and bad sides of racism”? what the fuck do you mean you weren’t trying to make a point and were merely trying to be 'accurate for the time'? I’m going to selectively apply death of the author here so that I don’t have to edit everything I just said because, like, jesus dude, I don't think a game has ever made me lose respect for its writer like this)

One last thing before I move on past the story: I’m notttttttt an Elizabeth fan, sorry. She never quite felt real or consistent as a character; more like a manic pixie dream girl, malleable to be whatever is required to facilitate the plot. The moment you meet her is the moment you free her from the gilded cage she’s been trapped in her whole life, and it was the same moment my suspension of belief broke. It feels like Elizabeth has barely any reaction to any of this, no horror at realizing just how large the world around her actually is, no transitional period to actually being outside for the first time in her life, she’s just immediately exuberant, so wide-eyed at everything, unable to stop herself from dancing with racists as soon as she hears fiddle music. And it comes off like like it’s trying to make her so Cute and Quirky and Lovable and to me it never really worked. Especially when the game pulls absolutely all the narrative beats you’d expect it to. The Liar Revealed bit leading into the Second Act Breakup — where once you get back together and she still doesn’t trust you the game can’t even fucking commit and have her not help you as much during combat because then maybe that’d at least be a fun way this attempt at art could actually remember what medium it’s in. You’ll have an argument that’ll open a (metaphorical) rift between the two of you and then you’ll point at a locked door and she’ll be like “I’ll get that open for you Mr. Booker : ) “ So much of her dialogue — especially once the game decides it wants to be about alternate dimensions and time travel — is so flowery and… honestly, I’d say a bit pretentious in execution, feeling like it’s actively trying to position itself (and a lot of the plot elements here) as complex and smart, thinking that by making it just barely intelligible whoever’s playing it will be like “wow… this is so complicated… and beyond me… this game is so intelligent…” By the way I just love how the game says, verbatim, “[y]ou don’t need to protect Elizabeth in combat[,] she can take care of herself” like it’s some girl power, progressive thing… then all she actually does in combat is throw you items, open doors you can't, let you tear rifts in time to give you things that’ll help you, teleport right near you when you’re not looking like that one Sherlock Holmes game. She’s basically all the things an escort NPC does except I guess making you actually have to escort her would be a point of division among the Gamers. And it very much falls into that trope where a female character primarily exists to bolster their male counterpart, except here they try and dress it up as if it's subversive and feminist. Between that and some of the quips, you could’ve made me think Joss Whedon wrote this.

So, uh, yeah. I’m not particularly into what this game has going narrative-wise. It wants to act as if it’s tackling these huge themes, it thinks it’s profound by doing so, yet at every turn it feels so unwilling to divide, or challenge, or properly stand for something that it veers away from anything interesting it could actually say — let alone how little it does anything with the medium it’s actually in. And- and Jesus I’m still so thrown by how it can’t commit to even going just ‘racism’ is bad, it has to both sides it, it has to please everybody, it’s so scared of alienating that it alienates itself. If this is art, then maybe that speaks to having to go back to art class.

...At least the gameplay’s loosely fun?

Which reveals my position in the debate, I guess. For all I’ve talked about what makes art — and why I feel like sometimes what gets touted as prestige doesn’t quite meet the metric — I don’t really have much of a horse in this race. I’ll be happy to do my best to discuss themes, and I’ll always look at these things as more than just product, but as a writer, as someone who looks at things from that lens, I’ve always personally been more interested in looking at things from a technical lens: the craft, how it’s refined, what works, what could use improvement. And from that lens, BioShock Infinite is… cromulent. I like shooting things. I like the way the game only giving you two guns basically encourages you to vary with what you carry with you — building an impromptu armory from whatever you can scrounge up around you. I’m fond of the ‘vigors’/phasmids/magic spells you can use, how they all help out in different ways. I especially like how this combines with the gear system in a way that lets the player create legit builds: on my end, I eventually ended up with this playstyle where I’d use a vigor to fling myself directly towards an enemy, whereupon I’d create a giant AOE explosion and wipe out whatever cluster of enemies surrounds my target. I also like the way the game… both hews close and veers away from BioShock the series. It has all the hallmarks, all the defining characteristics that made the series what it was, yet it alters or recontextualizes them in a way that makes them feel fresh. Chief among these is the setting — which, while visually rather breathtaking on its own, really works as a companion piece to Rapture, a city in the sky rather than a city in the sea — but there are other things too: the anachronistic covers of 60s-80s songs mirror BioShock 1/2‘s usage of period-accurate music while also working to set up the timey-wimey aspects of the plot. The combat feels exactly like the previous two games, yet the use of more open areas, in addition to mechanics like the skywires and the rifts make it feel much more fluid, much more arcadey than the claustrophobic meat grinder of Rapture. I’m not entirely sure whether it’s a step forward or a step back, necessarily, but it’s certainly an iteration: things have been looked at, tweaked to become brand new… while not losing the same feel they used to have. It’s neat to see in action.

But man, while I’m not somebody who usually likes judging a work for being an adaptation, a sequel, whatever, it is just… rather tragic that a lot of the wrong lessons seem to have been learned from it. The original BioShock, to me, is genuinely so cool in showing just what videogames: silly moral choice system aside, there’s so much going on with ludonarrative, and diegesis, and it feels like every little videogame-logic thing has something going on behind it in a way that contributes to the overall picture. To go from that, to something that has virtually nothing going on mechanically is such a disappointment. And, in turn, when what’s there instead is something that feels like it’s convinced itself of its ascension, that takes real-world sensitive subject matter for the sake of set design and abandons it once it's no longer needed, that mistakes being complicated for being smart, man am I not impressed. It’s funny, honestly, how this loosely ushered the whole era we’re in of prestige, ‘artsy’ games that at the same time seem so afraid of being video games, because it’s BioShock Infinite’s gameplay that makes me hesitate to call it outright bad. It thinks it’s some profound work, some real watershed moment, something that’s really pushing the medium of gaming forward. In reality, it feels much more like Oscar bait. 4/10.

…So does this mean I’m a real Dark Souls fan now?

I guess, in that regard, something really funny about experiencing this series for the first time: going through the Souls games actually set me up for failure here. I knew the… core of the series was about building your own mech, about making it face rather difficult battles, about a lot of the things that come to mind when I think about FROMSoft. Which then, upon receiving the ability to build my mech, with all the free will and utter lack of guidance in the world, made me think ‘okay, so I need to figure out what build I’m going for’ when… Armored Core does not run on that paradigm. One size does not fit all. You gotta know, or figure out, what’s coming ahead, and you have to retool yourself accordingly. Back in my “one build to rule them all” way of thinking, I picked caterpillar legs for my mech, figuring I wouldn’t mind losing speed in exchange for more defense/a better jump… one of the next missions after that, I have to keep up with a speeding robot and kill him before he reaches the bottom of a parking garage. I sidestep the problem by instead using my Dead by Daylight knowhow bulk to bodyblock the other robot from going down the ramp, but then… the next mission I have a three-minute time limit in which I end up using a whole minute getting to where I need to be for combat to start in the first place. At first, I thought I needed to stop using the caterpillar legs. Reading up a bit afterwards, learning what all the different stat names mean, I realize my mistake. And I realize how I’m actually meant to play the game.

And I’m happy I went through this game on its own terms! Because man is it so much more than just a game where you build a giant robot. Even minus the whole mix-and-match aspect of making your build appropriate to a mission, I just really love the whole way the economy works in this game. Maintaining a mech is expensive: between ammo costs, and having to undergo repairs, you’re going to lose a significant amount of any mission payout right out of the gate. That is… if you even do get a payout. Dying, giving up, failing the objective, more than likely means no payout… whereas you still need to pay your costs. It becomes a matter of doing your best to mitigate your own finances, but even then you can only do so much: you’ll still need to make some profit in order to be able to buy more gear for later missions. You can try and prep as well as you can with the scant information you’re given, but that doesn’t help when something happens right out of the blue mid-mission. It’s true that you can save scum and reload until you complete the mission like a coward, like me but if you don’t you have so many things you have to consider whenever you go on a mission: if things go bad straight away, do you cut your losses and take a smaller penalty or do you take a risk trying to get something out of your endeavour? If you fail (and the game lets you reattempt), do you try again, hoping that the knowledge you gained on the field will make the difference, or do you take the risk on something you haven’t done before? Do you sell a redundant piece of gear now to try and afford something else, or do you keep it on you as a financial asset: money that you won’t lose should you take a net loss? So many things you have to consider, and the game is so happy to facilitate it: letting things sell for the exact amount you also buy them for is genius. Honestly, between all that and the limited ammo counts on missions I’d honestly call this reminiscent of survival horror. Just, perhaps, driving on significantly different fears as is normal.

The plot itself takes a bit of a backseat — being delivered to you mostly via mission briefings and emails sent to you — but the picture it paints is quite potent. You’re a mech pilot — a ‘Raven,’ as the game coins it — built to try and keep a post-apocalyptic Earth functioning, but almost immediately the facade cracks. As a new pilot, you get a choice between two different missions… killing squatters living in a factory that’s about to be redeveloped, or using force to put down a protest. But don't worry: once you've obtained enough money to firmly 'teach [the dispossessed] the rules of society', you can upgrade your AC and take on some jobs of real importance. While you start off working for the authorities, you’re soon drafted into a war between two corporations, Chrome and Murakumo, each of whom trying to claim they’re the better option yet both obviously having only their own interests, and profit at heart. One mission has you wreak havoc across the city, destroying infrastructure, fighting law enforcement merely because they’re trying to stop you. Sometimes you’re hired by groups that actually do have humanity’s best interests in mind… only for the corpos to then hire you to wipe them out, oftentimes with some rather flimsy justification as to why doing so is for the greater good that you have no choice but to trust them on. Sometimes you’ll come across co-workers — people from your own mercenary company — in the field of battle… and you’re fully expected to wipe them out without any sort of remorse: not your fault they chose the wrong payday. In Armored Core, you’re nothing close to a hero: you’re a PMC goon, more than happy to be a pawn between two corpos as their war brings what remains of humanity closer to ruin. Any actual good you do is a happy accident in the name of getting your next payday. It’s all this theming — and just how blunt the game is about what you’re doing — that I think is this game’s strongest aspect, and I’d love to see how it translates/continues as the series goes on, as it takes what seems to be a Final Fantasy? esque approach of soft-rebooting for each numbered entry.

I’d also be curious to see how gameplay gets refined in future instalments, because while the (armoured) core is there — and the resource management aspects really bring it to another level — I think maybe the game suffers a bit from being of its time. It’s mostly fun: movement mostly feels good when you’re not getting stuck on something, and I love dogfighting with other robots — trying to get a bead on them while trying to shake off their bead on you — though I feel… that maybe this game, like a good amount of its contemporaries, was in that era where game devs didn’t quite know what to do about third person free cameras yet. The main problem is that it moves so sloooooooowwwwwwwwwww: in a game where you need to keep your sights on the enemy, it’s rough when you’re instead constantly trying to look for them as they zip over your head, moving faster than you're allowed to keep up. Verticality is a nightmare: you’re not going to see much if you try to look up or down because your mech’s going to then cover nearly the entire screen, which is especially rough when the game decides it’s suddenly a platformer — where, with every jump, you either don’t know where you’re going to want to go to, or you don’t know where you’re going to land. Any moment there were any enemies moving around above me was a moment I’d lose a ton of health: involving me desperately trying to get a long enough hold on their position (even with upgrades reducing lock-on time) to fire whereas they aren’t beholden to the same restriction, peppering me and peppering me as I’m moving the camera around at a sluggish pace trying to keep up, hoping that the damage I'm taking wouldn’t be enough to fuck me over for the rest of the mission. To say nothing about some of the labyrinths they throw you in, too. I never knew dungeon crawling was a staple of the series.

And perhaps all that hampered my enjoyment of the game — god knows there were some missions I tried to avoid until it turned out they were required for progress — but even despite that, I enjoyed my time playing Armored Core! It's sometimes fun, sometimes a bit miserable, but with stuff there — story and otherwise — that kept it compelling even through the low points. I’m not sure this 1.0 is the pinnacle, there’s certainly innovation to be made yet, but in a way that makes me more excited to check out the rest of this series. I’d love to see what iterations are made: what moving parts are mixed and matched for the times ahead. 7/10.

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.

I’ve never watched Twin Peaks. Not for any particular reason, mind you — I’m bad at watching episodic things and there sure are a lot of them out there — though, given just how many things it’s influenced, perhaps I should get around to it. If, in part, so I can see just how much it influences Alan Wake. It’s not like the game is lost to me just because I didn’t do the required reading — it’s not solely beholden on its references, and even if it was it still draws from other things (like Stephen King, House of Leaves, The Twilight Zone, etc.) that are far more in my wheelhouse — but it does feel like I’m missing a piece of the puzzle, knowing that it’s an influence yet not knowing how it impacts the work in question. Is it merely how the game is set in a small town with a dark secret? Is it the cast of offbeat, often kooky, often exaggerated townspeople? Is it the way the game often calls its framing into account: how it frequently calls into question whether the events depicted are real, or representative of something else entirely? I can guess, but I can only guess — I don’t even know whether that last one is something Twin Peaks even does. I suppose it doesn’t super matter, but, like, usually when I go through something I wanna learn alllllllll about it. And in the case of something like Alan Wake — where it’s operating on multiple different narrative layers, where it’s in some ways actively seeking analysis and interpretation from the audience — I liked it enough to feel like I should maybe do my homework. At least before I delve into the series further.

I’ll start with the easiest thing to talk about, if, mainly, for the sake of getting a foothold: I wasn’t expecting this to be as combat-heavy as it was. I knew there was combat, of course — that the game carried a balance between walking-sim-esque segments where you explored the town/chatted with the inhabitants vs. pretty direct gameplay segments where you fought against The Darkness — but I didn’t think, going in, that the ratio would veer so heavily towards the latter. It’s fun, though! It’s certainly much more action-oriented than survival horror — much like a Resident Evil 4, even down to the way your flashlight functions as a laser pointer for your weapons — yet sticks the landing much more than a non-zero amount of its contemporaries do. What I think sells it is its simplicity. Near every encounter comes down to shining some sort of light on them to remove their defences before using some sort of weapon to kill them dead. You don’t even need to aim for the head — bodyshots do the same damage, it’s just mostly a matter of getting them weak in the first place, making sure you have enough ammo on hand, then letting rip. There are remarkably few enemy types (you have your normal guy, your tough guy, your fast guy, your chainsaw guy, but nothing much more than that) — the diversity primarily lies in the type of encounter: are you getting intercepted from point A to point B? Do you have to battle your way through the hoard? Do you have to hold out against the horde? There are a lot of different situations you find yourself in, and through that a lot of situational tools that make each encounter feel unique, from your environment, to the things around you, to the tools you have with you.

Which, speaking of? By and large? Fun to use! Your pistol is shockingly capable: it’s accurate, it has a fun kick to it, it kills enemies in three hits, but if you don’t have the time or the ammo, you can instead use the shotgun or hunting rifle to obliterate the enemy where they stand. If that’s not enough, if you’re in the middle of being overwhelmed… man I love love love how the game just gives you its equivalent of the rocket launcher. And lets you choose how to manage its resources! Do you choose to use it now or later? If you do it now, do you know if you’re going to get more ammo for it later? If you don’t use it now, do you know if what’s down the road is even worth using it later? Of course, you can bypass all these problems by just finding enough treasure chests to make sure you have ammo forever, which…

Leads me to another thing I love: how much the game rewards exploration. The environments you explore are huge, and oftentimes have much more than the player ever has to cover. You can keep going down the path you’re meant to, and the game’s compass (once you notice it) does a good job at delineating what’s “the path” and what’s comparatively more optional, but should you want to look around, you’re rewarded in a variety of ways. If you want a little more extra story content, you can find radios lying around, pages you can read, even little Twilight Zone knockoff TV episodes the game allows you to watch in full. If you want gameplay advantages for going the extra mile, the chests/lootboxes give you more flare gun ammo and flashbangs than you’re ever going to need - and often give you one of the shotgun/hunting rifle before the level would otherwise let you have it. And if you just like exploring for exploring’s sake, you can sate Alan Wake’s addiction to coffee by finding it in the most unlikely of places. The game lets you go above and beyond, as well. Near the beginning, you’re at the bottom of a chasm, a rope bridge across from the cabin you’ve been heading to. You can go across like the game directs you to… or you can instead climb all the way back up the cliff… just to get a coffee thermos. You never have to go up there, and you never get the chance to go up there again. The game, in general, really encourages you to go off the beaten path - offering multiple incentives to entice you to do so, but not only that, the game and the level design lets you go to so many nooks, so many side routes, so many places you never otherwise need to go just to facilitate all these collectables. The world is way bigger than it has to be. To some extent, that’s commendable.

And it’s so fascinating how much focus there is on how it plays, given, ostensibly, that it's a game that’s… primarily all about its story. Perhaps it’s a remnant of when Alan Wake was initially meant to be an open-world game with a day/night cycle — much like, of all things, Deadly Premonition — though this then makes the result… feel somewhat imbalanced, where often it feels like you’re going through looooong gameplay segments and the narrative is being left by the wayside. Not to say the latter isn’t effective, though! As… little as it feels like we spend our time in the town, I liked the glimpses of it that we got! Specifically I loved a lot of the bit characters/NPCs. They lean a little off-beat, a little eccentric, but yet never so much that they don’t feel like real people — more in that sense of, like, that one person from your hometown everybody knows who's a liiiiiiitle bit off their rocker. They’re cute, they’re fun, and I like how they turn Alan into a straight man for whatever antics they force upon him — waitress Rose's obsession with him immediately blowing his cover the moment he enters town, or FBI Hemingway's referring to him solely by other American writers. There’s other little things I like too: the Twilight Zone parodies you find on TVs around the place are fairly on point (and made me realize just how much it kind of is a more adult Goosebumps episode lmao), and the radio shows do a lot to let the world around you feel lived in, and let the writing seep in even during sections where you’re just traversing from one place to another. The manuscript pages are fun for this too: sometimes they recap what just happened, sometimes they tell you what’s about to happen, sometimes they let you know what’s happening beyond your immediate scope, and sometimes they’re just really cute bits of narrative, like the one where Alan picks up a page about him picking up a page and it enters a recursion loop. Every person you talk to, every sign you walk past, every little thing around you helps build up the world around you. To some extent this game could be a case study in how much the micro-level stuff matters in building up a greater picture.

On a macro level — the overarching narrative — it’s… certainly ambitious, but ultimately I reckon sticks the landing. The game draws from pulp novels: not just from the novels themselves, but also how the personal lives of the authors would impact their work — how a lot of these novels had writers/some-form-of-self-insert as the main character, Stephen King not even remembering writing Cujo because he was on so much coke at the time, etc. It’s metatextual, as much a story about itself, and the writing process, as much as it is about a story about Alan Wake fighting against The Taken. The in-universe manuscript the plot of the game is forced to follow is as much of a first draft as anything written, in, say, NaNoWriMo, and the game has so much fun with that: plot holes, kibble, deux ex machinae are present yet accounted for. The story will often turn on a dime, often into stock plots or cop-out endings, much in the way someone would if they’re writing to get words out with no idea of where they’re actually going. Characters or things appear, are professed as important, then will drop out of the plot entirely the moment their scene ends. Even some of the kooky characters will make sense from that lens — an author having to write something fast rather than write it well, relying on cliches that seem much less true to life once those characters start walking and talking in a 3D space. I also enjoy how much the writer makes his way into the work. I’m… not necessarily familiar with Sam Lake’s works, nor do I know much of Remedy as a whole, but I like what I see: the way Alan’s attempt at writing something other than a noir thriller results in a total nightmare of a creation process, how the game stops at a halt so that the in-universe version of a band whose members Sam Lake is friends with can play a few of their songs. To some extent, every work of writing has a bit of the author in it — their experiences, their way of thinking, the specific things they’re a fan of — and often by going through these works one gets to learn about the one who created it along the way. Metatext (or, rather, metafiction) often brings this relationship to the forefront through its continual self-analysis, and Alan Wake, narratively, shines at its brightest on this front, presenting a story that is as much about the process of writing as it is about its literal events, and in turn letting us see just a little about the mind behind it.

There’s… a couple things that bring this game down, mostly on the gameplay end. The game’s use of vehicles leaves… something to be desired: they’re often required for traversal/combat within certain sections, yet trying to use them for their intended purpose is oftentimes clunky, accidentally getting the car stuck on a surface when trying to U-turn it in the direction of the enemies, accidentally drifting it off a cliff trying to make a simple turn. Not even going into how easily it is for the camera to make you motion sick going into certain cars. While I do know that survival horror isn’t meant to be ‘fun’ by definition, a lot of the sections where the game takes away your items I felt were rather the lowlight, often feeling as if they were total crapshoots as to whether I could run through before I got wombo combo’d to death. Some levels — again, perhaps, because of the game’s initial premise as open world — feel rather too long, and often seem to be there to fill time, more than anything. The final level, in particular, has almost nothing story-wise between beginning and end, and while you can pick up pages/listen to Alan’s thoughts the plot doesn’t actually progress until you’ve reached the final section, leaving like, two hours of combat for combat’s sake in-between. I guess it’s a good thing they were able to use all those assets from when it was originally open world? It just… maybe could’ve benefited from being a little more streamlined. Or at least, in the final level’s case, having a bit more between A and B.

As a whole, though, that doesn’t fully detract from near everything this game has going for it. From how well the gameplay does the action horror formula — doing a lot from what little it has, and just from how much the game world encourages and rewards random exploration — to how well the story functions both as a metafiction and as a narrative in its own right, to even the most minor of things: I legit did the Leo pointing meme when I heard, of all Nick Cave songs, Up Jumped the Devil playing on a radio in the woods. It’s not quite a tour de force, and it was much more of a cult classic than a blockbuster when it released (given it released right next to Red Dead Redemption), but… to an extent, that feels appropriate. Something that goes in as many different directions as this does I think works best as an unsung darling. Besides, Twin Peaks, as beloved as it was, didn’t do too well in the ratings either.

…I think. Don’t quote me on that.

(8/10.)

The story goes, apocryphically, that a lot of the reason games in the NES era had their difficulty jacked up so high was to try and pad out the runtime — and to make sure the game couldn’t be beaten in any sort of rental period. These things were expensive to create and mass-produce, so why not make sure the audience gets their money’s worth by making sure the process of beating the game takes as long as possible? Early adventure games, in particular, feel like they took that idea and fucking ran with it: not only using its trial and error to make the game longer, but by burying every process within several layers of esotericism, writing the margin for error in invisible ink so it can take several hours before you realize you’ve made the game unwinnable, that (in an era before the internet was super widespread/commercially available) you basically needed to also buy the strategy guide if you actually wanted to beat the game. It’s kind of incredible to see it in motion, honestly, some of the straight-up dickish things done in this vein. Having to set things up several hours in advance so that you’re ready once those chickens come home to roost. Needing to go so far off the beaten track to figure out what path you’re even meant to be going down that most walkthroughs will often skip that step and start with the part where you actually progress with the game. Stuff that comes with very little warning, where, if you don’t have the exact answer at that exact moment, you get a game over, and have to go back to a previous save to get the means to prevent that from happening. That is, if you even know what it was that fucked you over in the first place.

Dark Seed, debut effort from developer/publisher Cyberdreams, is rife with this shit. The moment you start the game — after a quick bathroom break to shower and get rid of your monster headache — you must go down to your study, look at the building plans, then knock on the wall to find your house has a secret room which contains… nothing but a rope. You then must take this rope to the attic, push a chest out of the way to access a balcony, tie that rope around the balcony to then… access your own backyard. Pointless now, but two in-game days later you’ll get arrested and game overed if you attempt to leave your house by the front door. You might think you could just wait until the requisite time to do it, but, however, halfway through the game, you get forcibly arrested and sent to jail. You can get out easily, and keep your items along the way, but about 20~ mins later when you’re sent to jail again you’ll lose every item… except for three items you’re allowed to hide under your pillow the first time you’re jailed. You have to pick three specific items: one because it lets you escape the cell, the other two because they’re items you explicitly need to use both before and after you go to jail. If you don’t bring any one of these three items, you get softlocked. If something you still need later gets taken away from you during that moment, you don’t get it back, you get softlocked when you suddenly need it. And you won’t know messed up until it comes time for the reaper to collect. It’s genuinely kinda insidious. You could just wait to pick up that rope until after your adventures in jail, but you do have to go through that room to arbitrarily affect something else later on in the game, and how are you meant to know that ahead of time?

Oh, by the way, the game runs on real-time, a-la a Dead Rising or a Majora’s Mask. You wake up in the morning, and if you’re in the wrong place by bedtime, you fall asleep on the spot and get a game over. You’ve got three days to beat the game. You get to check the time by checking your watch, but, oops, that gets taken away when you go to jail. You will have to meet certain appointments by being in certain places at certain times, lest you miss it, and by doing so miss the related item, and by doing so inevitably resulting in a softlock. Going in, hearing about it, I was like "oh, so I have a set amount of time to beat the game? I hope it shows a bit of mercy about that." As it turns out, that was the least of my problems.

Which, by the way, one last puzzle I just have to talk about: on the second day, you encounter a monster on a bridge you need to cross. The only way to get him out of the way is to throw a stick off the bridge, as — much like a dog — this will cause him to rush for the stick, leaping off the bridge into the abyss. How do you get said stick, by the way? Well, on the first day, you have to buy some scotch at the store, which will then prompt your neighbour to enter the store, giving you his business card and inviting you over to his house tomorrow at six PM. When you make the appointment (which, by the way, if you assume he’ll meet you in your front yard, as opposed to your backyard? he doesn’t come, softlock) you’ll find that his idea of entertainment is making you watch him play fetch with his dog over and over again. This’ll repeat endlessly until you give him the scotch, after which he’ll down the whole bottle in one go and go to bed, leaving you free to grab the one thing (or, well, two: you also need his business card to avoid a softlock) you needed out of all of this. And then you have to do a bunch of shit right after this: getting arrested again, getting out of jail, doing a bunch of things afterwards all while the threat of Mike conking out for the day looms over your head. Legitimately the whole game is just a matter of hitting softlocks, trying to figure out what exactly caused said softlock, then keeping that in your memory bank as you run up against all the other softlocks. Which, admittedly, is a bit typical for the era, but at least its contemporaries are a little less all about that.

And usually, other adventure games from this era have something going on narratively which makes a lot of the… walkthrough-heavy gameplay worth it. Dark Seed... is a bit more give and take. There’s a non-zero amount here that I’m down with: I’m into how generally sparse and empty the areas and atmosphere are, and I also like the general horror concept of the Light World/Dark World — and how, physically, the latter counterparts the former, invoking a little bit of a guessing game as to what’s supposed to be what. I love the H.R Giger artwork, how well it characterizes the Dark World as this unnatural, abberative place that’s almost human yet at the same time absolutely not, the ways this influence seeps and infects parts of the comparatively normal Light World and in general how unsettling it feels to have it all around you: even beyond the time limit, the vibes were so off that whenever I was in the dark world I wanted to speed through what I was doing and get out as soon as possible. Other than that… there doesn’t feel like there’s much here, at least storywise. I like the idea of moving into a seemingly haunted house, discovering notes left by the previous owner and trying to find out what happened to him before it happens to you… but in practice it’s rather undone by the adventure game logic and how much of an idiot you come off as: having bought a completely dilapidated home, with broken windows, drafts in every room, a kitchen you can’t even use... yet is totally surprised at this being the case, apparently never even looking at said house before buying it. He expresses more of a reaction at finding the garage rather messy than he does at going through his living room mirror and entering a H.R Giger nightmare dimension. Barely anything about him is expounded in game — why he’s moved in, what he even does for a living, who he even is besides the fact that the game’s plot is happening to him. Most of his descriptions of what’s happening around him take me out of the experience rather than immerse me further in it, and for a game that’s as heavy on setting a tone, story-wise, as Dark Seed, that’s not particularly amazing. I feel like this game loosely… min-maxed a little, with its style and substance. While it makes good on its promise to let you play around in a H.R Giger artscape, what surrounds this is rather little, and in the end mostly feels rather lacking.

Which, among other problems, ultimately results in Dark Seed... not quite feeling up to par. On the art design side, it’s by and large well done. On most of its other sides, it struggles: gameplay wise it’s an experience in trying to find the one sequence of events that doesn’t end with a softlock/game over, and narratively there isn’t nearly enough there to make up for what you need to do to progress through it. While noteworthy in the context of Cyberdreams’ short stint — this not being their final attempt to bring the work of another artist into the medium of video games — in the broader context of 90s adventure games, Dark Seed... isn’t quite able to compete with some of its counterparts. 3/10.

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 :).

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.