For what’s ostensibly a mashup between two different inspirations — the Siren series and Junji Ito’s The Hanging Balloons — it’s neat to see just how well the two blend together. Your goal is to find an old family heirloom in an abandoned village, pursued by beings known as ‘The Ascended’: the former denizens who have since become hot-air-balloon-like creatures, capable of flying high above the ground, with the aim of swooping in and killing you on sight. Your only recourse against them is to use your family’s ancestral ability to enter the senses of those around you, seeing what the Ascended see, figuring out where they are, and using that to escape their notice as you delve deeper and deeper into the village. I love how varied the level design is: you never do the same thing twice. You can go from having to sneak across a large swathe of the town, to having to solve a puzzle to get rid of the enemies guarding where you need to go, to then having to open and close doors to bait and trap enemies and clear a path through. Even when the game goes back to ‘sneak through this gauntlet’ there’s generally some twist to keep it fresh: maybe you have to climb up rather than go across, maybe you have to sneak through a maze, maybe you have something that can help you navigate through all the enemies. The game consistently keeps itself fresh, and even if some sections are more memorable than others it never wears out its welcome, doing a very effective job at building up right until the end.

I… do wish the sensejacking mechanics were a bit more viable? A lot of the time when I tried to use it I found myself trying to figure out which enemy I was even in the head of — and, conversely, which specific enemy was the one I needed to sensejack — and while there are sometimes context clues to help figure it out, the environmental design is maybe a bit too samey for you to immediately tell if you’re in the head of the enemy you’re looking for, compounded by how long scrolling through the list can generally take. Maaaaaaaakes some areas a bit rough to go through, and a lot of the time made just trying to improvise and stealth more viable than using sensejacking to plan ahead. Aside from that, though, this was super cool: I love the core mechanic and how the game toys with it the further and further you go through, and I’m also a fan of a lot of the little visual design quirks — how your sensejacking is represented, how you can see the gunk inside the necks of the Ascended — and even if maybe I wish the core mechanic was a little less disorientating it still does a lot of cool (and creepy) shit with it. Definitely recommend this, and I’m really hoping to see more cool stuff from this dev in the future.

The story of Garten of Banban is a simple one: somebody makes a thing, somebody else calls the thing cringe, everybody dogpiles on it, and the thing gains attention and sales and notoriety it wouldn't have gotten had it never received that initial derision. In the case of Banban, somebody made a tweet making fun of how they were already trying to sell merch upon just releasing the game, causing a snowball of Youtubers and other commentators decrying the game as the ‘death of mascot horror.’ How Garten of Banban represented the apex point in how indie horror had ‘fallen’ into a vector of cheap commercialization: the use of lore and episodic releases merely a vehicle to sell merchandise (which, believe me, real rich when those critiques come from the Bendy & The Ink Machine dev). This brought upon a wave of people to shit on the game, in a way that pretty directly gave it success in a way the developers had never been able to capture before — I was loosely aware of their output before they released Banban, and lemme tell you, they weren’t exactly doing numbers before it became cool to dunk on them. It’s the type of thing where the hate train based on its obvious bid for commercialization vs. low quality gave it the exact attention it wanted, one where the game itself isn’t as important but what it represents, and what it then managed to do.

So what’s the game actually like?

…It’s mostly just kind of whatever.

Not good, mind you, but not nearly worth the attention it got, nor does it really deserve to be amongst the worst games ever. Frankly, playing it, I was mostly just amused by just how hard it apes from Poppy Playtime’s first episode. It’s far more well known today about how its attempt at making as much money as possible caused it to burn out and lose all the goodwill it had, but something people tend to forget about Poppy Playtime is that part of how it got the opportunity to get to that point was because of the genuine promise its first episode showed. It had a really solid core mechanic and some neat puzzles to go along with it. The chase scene at the end is a rather well-done climax, forcing you to think on your feet and working well to pay off all the tension that'd been slowly building as you went deeper and deeper — as the reception area became a factory, and as it slowly became clear that something's wrong with the place around you.

Garten of Banban tries these things… and doesn’t quite reach the same success. The drone you direct around the facility mostly just feels like it’s there so the game actually has mechanics, and it’s clunky and finicky and awkward to direct around, especially when you’re trying to change its vertical position or corral it through a door. The one puzzle the game has is braindead until it's not, the last step requiring rather specific use of the drone in an unclear order of operations which makes it feel rather oblique. It never really quite makes use of its setting: while Poppy Playtime uses its setting in a factory to inform its puzzles/setpieces and let the player do fun things, it feels like you could transplant Garten of Banban to virtually anywhere else and it’d play the same way (you don’t even get to go down the slide :c). Any attempts at building tension, or atmosphere don’t work. The messages on the wall might be a decent idea, but the writing chops are not there to make it work, and all the attempts at having the kindergarten… teacher… mascot… things try and be scary just feel laughable: the weird and simplistic designs combined with their really loud colours just makes anything they do feel rather goofy.

Its attempt at imitating the climactic chase sequence of Poppy Playtime’s first episode is also rather ineffective. While I do like the idea of Opila Bird’s AI trying to imitate a bird of prey, the setting fails to take advantage of any of that: depending on your positioning when the chase starts you’re either immediately fucked or can clear the whole thing in like, five seconds. There’s no music, no difference in the sound design, no real attempt at a change in tone to signify that this is the big climactic threat: it’s treated with the exact same gravitas as everything else you’ve done up to that point. The main reaction I had upon completing the chase was ‘wait, that’s it?’ spending what was left assuming that something more would happen, beyond the "oh boy, next episode's gonna be real wild!" cliffhanger I knew wouldn't mean anything. That there'd be something concrete, here and now, that’d deliver a tangible climax. That there’d be one last attempt at a scare.

…There wasn’t.

Frankly, I’m not sure I can name anything this game executed to its intended effect, but on the other hand, I personally can’t manifest enough in me to truly dislike or hate this. Like, it functions, it's short, I wasn’t actively having to fight the game to try and beat it, most of its flaws just feel... goofy, if anything. Is it good? No. Should my score for this maybe be lower? Probably. Is it really worth all the vitriol, all the negative attention, all the claims that this game is the death of indie horror as we know it? Frankly, I don’t see it. 3/10.

I’m not really sure what the general consensus on Final Fantasy VIII is, but among my circles… it’s divisive. In one circle, it’s generally loathed: they don’t like the cast, they definitely don’t like the battle system, and if you try to talk about how you actually like those things you’re going to be starting an argument. My other circle… are a bit more lowkey about it, but they vibe with it — because of the setting, the cast, and because of how weird and interpretive the plot can be. It’s… an interesting dichotomy — hearing people talk shit in one Discord server only for me to then look over and see my other friends talk positively about it, with me, in the middle, not really knowing which side I leant closer to. I’d played the game before, but not enough before my PS3 crapped out and stopped me from playing it, the only impression I really had being that… it was a game I definitely wanted backseating for. Which was why I didn’t initially pick it back up once I got other options to play it, but then, this year, I needed to beat an RPG released before 2000, and I had a slot open up, so I figured ‘hey, let’s finally play it and see on what side of the axis I fall.’ So I did, and I went through all ~45 hours, and ultimately…

…It’s okay.

Which, for an RPG such as this, is a bit of an indictment. If I’m playing something that veers that long, then… I really want to be doing more than just going through the motions. It’s a bit as to why I don’t play RPGs as often as some of my friends do: the time investment is way too high for something to be merely ‘fine,’ or even 'good.' If something really draws me in and makes me invested, then it really makes the runtime fly by (even if I’m usually like “okay, I’m ready to wrap this up” long before I reach the end). If the game isn’t all that great, then I can still at least look at what’s in motion and see where exactly things are going wrong, even if I could maybe do the same thing with a game that’s much shorter. If the game is merely cromulent, then it truly just becomes a drag. What might be 35 hours feels more like 90. I could drop the game for months or even years and still not regain the spark that initially pulled me in. I truly only keep on out of a feeling of obligation — whatever reason I chose to play the game in the first place, my inbuilt headworms that will not let any game go unfinished if I can help it. Final Fantasy VIII… fares better than most other RPGs of that ilk, being mostly shorter (and structured in a way where you can really just gun it to the end after a certain point), but… to be honest, if I wasn’t playing this the way I was playing it, the game as background noise as I hangout with online friends… I probably would have lost interest in beating this. At least within a reasonable timeframe. It’s not the game that really would’ve held me onto it otherwise.

The story follows Leon Squall Leonheart, a recently graduated child soldier trained at Balamb Garden: a boarding school and mercenary force deployed all over the world. While Squall is one of the best in his field — one of two people in the whole world capable of using a gunblade — he’s far less capable in his personal life, his blunt and aloof demeanour pushing his cohort away from him. However, on his first mission — to help a resistance effort liberate a city from foreign control — he finds himself in too deep on multiple fronts: with a simple mission of assassinating the president slowly exposing a web of political ramifications that soon put the world itself at stake, with Squall’s walls slowly breaking down as his mission places him in the company of Shiva Rinoa Heartly, a girl who seems absolutely hellbent on breaking him out of his shell.

I’ll start off by getting the most pervasive thing out of the way: the junction system sucks. The way it works is that… effectively, rather than armour or weapons, you instead equip spells onto yourself to directly boost your stats, but the whole process is explained so poorly (I do love the tutorial being given to me two or three words at a time) and implemented in such an overcomplicated way that it was such a drag every time I had to interface with it. This is mostly because the initial requirement is to equip your summons (or ‘GFs’, as they’re called in-game) in order to junction your stats — and while I assume the intention was for each party member to be equipped with their own GFs, GFs also require EXP to learn new passive skills and increase their stats, which means that if you don’t want to have any of your GFs fall behind… all of them have to be in the party at once. This means that every time you switch party members, you have to manually rejunction everybody, navigating through menus or menus to individually pick which magic best fits each stat (there’s a thing that’ll automatically pick magic for you, and a system that lets you switch magic inventories with other party members, but they both suck) and it’s so miserable to have to interact with. It’s especially bad whenever the party splits into several groups: you’ll junction one group, presuming you’ll do something with them… then before you even get to go into a fight you’re forced to play as the other group and then you have to manually rejunction them… until the point where you actually switch back and rejunction them, and then you switch back again and have to rejunction them, etc etc etc…

And the draw system works, I feel, to make combat… way too simplistic and not particularly engaging. As opposed to previous Final Fantasy games, where spells are limited by an overall MP pool, magic here instead must be drawn from enemies as an action in combat, with each use of draw giving you a couple of uses of whatever spells they have assigned to them. This, theoretically, eliminates the woes of having to deal with MP… but the limited amount of casts allowed for a specific spell, and the somewhat tedious process the player is initially stuck with to get more spells afterwards often make magic feel too costly to use — especially since this magic is much better junctioned to your stats than cast in battle. Summons, comparatively, do more damage and are almost entirely free to use… but then proceed to make you watch a 30+ second animation every time you summon them, with no real interaction rather than a rather finicky button-mashing minigame you can unlock to boost its power. Regular attacks (and fishing for Limit Breaks) instead become your primary way of interacting with enemies as you reach the later stages, partially because it’s your highest damage option, partially because… the lack of variety in enemy types or gimmicks (nothing in this game resists physical damage) often means that there’s no reason to do anything other than keep attacking, making for strategically bare and rather boring fights. This lack of variety, I feel, also ranges to your party: the only things that separate each of them mechanically are what magic they have in their inventory and what limit break they happen to have, meaning that there's never a need to build a specific party for a specific threat, nor is there any real way you can build a specific strategy using your party's unique capabilities, making combat as a whole feel... rather simple, once you navigate through all the fluff surrounding functioning and drawing. There are exceptions, of course — bosses which possess a diverse and imposing moveset (or a gimmick overarching the battle) where often the key to defeating them is located through the spells you can draw from them, but as a whole… I was really not into this battle system, especially given how slow all the animations feel and how frequent (like, every two steps in some parts of the overworld) they were.

The story… is something I have mixed feelings about. It starts off well: the initial section where you’re at school is a fairly decent introduction to the characters and mechanics, I really like the way the subsequent mission slowly escalates off the rails — as it goes from something routine for a freshly graduated soldier to a situation where everybody is… way in over their heads, and I like how the characters grapple with that. I’m also a fan of the flashback sequences: they help to set up how… abstract the plot can get, and on their own they’re fun little isolated episodes that take decent advantage of the game’s strength in scenario and character writing. However, I feel like once the plot starts approaching its final act (rooooughly right at the start of Disc 3) it kind of starts falling apart. Most of the plot threads the story had actively been following right up to the end of Disc 2 feel like they get dropped, and in its place the game just dumps a ton of exposition about people and things that had never appeared or had been brought up beforehand without any real explanation of who they are or what they even mean. What happens subsequently feels… slapdash — while there’s a decent emotional throughline that takes you from place to place I really felt like things were just happening without any setup or justification. This culminates in a final confrontation with the main antagonist I found… rather weak — for how much the game throws everything out of the way to try and establish who she is and what her goals are, the one actual interaction we get with her is… truly just “I am Chaos! I will cause Time Compression (what does that even mean)! Mwahahahaha, prepare to die!” I can understand things becoming more abstract and reliant on the personal interpretation of the player — I particularly liked the ending FMV for how out there it got — but from my perspective a lot of what constituted the lategame… wasn’t that: it felt more like the plot lost a lot of its internal coherence and started rushing towards a conclusion… rather alien to what it was initially set out as.

The cast, I feel, was the consistent strong suit of the game. I wouldn’t necessarily place them among my favourite RPG ensembles, or anything, but they’re consistently solid and fun and the best parts of the game’s writing. Even when the plot takes a turn for the worse — and, at the same time, the rest of the cast takes a backseat for Squall and Rinoa — the game still makes sure to give them little moments and never lets them fall into irrelevance. Leon Squall was somebody I expected to not be into, but I like the way his internal thought process is represented (all the times he’s insecure about something, or whenever he’s second-guessing himself) and I like the way he slowly thaws and opens up over the course of the game. Shiva Rinoa is a really cool counterpoint to him; I’ll admit that sweet and sour romances are loosely a bit my thing, and I kind of like the way the love triangle compares to FF7 — with you being one of the two on the outside as opposed to being the one at the centre — but I love how continuous she is about challenging Squall and trying to break down his walls. Selphie is my favourite of this party: she’s just so fun and it’s always a blast to see how straight-up psychotic she is under her energetic and friendly exterior. Quistis… is the one weak link — I feel like she loses her lane once the Squall/Rinoa will-they-won’t-they begins — but I’m fond of how much she just fucks with Squall during Disc 1. Irvine’s someone who’s ostensibly a side character, but I like the dramatic beats he gets: he carries a non-zero amount of the plot on his shoulders and I reckon he handles it in a way that does him fairly well and helps to set up and foreshadow that particular plot thread. Zell… got a lot less than I was thinking he would going in, but he’s cool: he’s not a particularly revolutionary take on the ‘hothead doofus’ archetype but he pretty consistently delivers on that front. As a whole… I do like the more down to Earth approach they took with your main party: it strikes a good balance of matching the military tone of the (earlier) story while still making them feel distinct and fun as characters. As far as Final Fantasy games go… I don’t think I’d rank them that high as a unit compared to the casts surrounding them, but I do think this is one of those games where the cast is what delivers: the consistently best moments were all bits the cast had with each other, and as I progressed through the plot I did so because I wanted to see what this group would say next.

Some other notes: Triple Triad is fun. I wish the AI for it was a little better (they always seemed to be playing to not lose, rather than playing to win), but it’s a fun little strategic dopamine booster and never got old even when I was grinding for specific cards. I’m a fan of the crafting system: it provides a much less tedious way of getting specific magic than trying to draw from enemies would, and I like how it and the level-scaling reconfigure grinding — instead of grinding to gain levels directly, you’re doing it to search for certain tools, either to craft into something strong or to refine into particularly strong spells. The final dungeon has a neat gimmick, one that inserts a breath of strategy into the otherwise sterile battle system, as you have to pick and choose what parts of it you need for the next fight or can save for later — though I think it’s too little, too late. By the time I reached it I just powered through it as quickly as possible because I was at the point where I wanted the game to end. The FMVs still look really good today, and it’s so cool how seamlessly the game can go from a cutscene rendered in-engine to FMV and back again. Every time one happened (which was a lot) I was pretty impressed.

As a whole… I definitely have some mixed feelings about this game. For as well as the story starts, and for as much as I enjoyed the cast the whole way through, I felt encumbered by the tedious and honestly quite rough battle system. And while I did enjoy how weird and abstract the later parts of the story could get, the story itself really goes in a direction for the worse: where things happen in a way that feels quite overcomplicated and where important people or events just suddenly appear and are relevant out of the blue. As a whole… I’m still not particularly sure where I fall in the debate about FF8. Maybe I’m a bit closer to the side of the people who like it because… in the end, I don’t think I hated it, but ultimately… I don’t think that appeals to me. I didn’t really love it, either. 5/10.

The first of three winter-themed games Nitrome released during 2007’s Christmas season, Thin Ice involves the player using their mouse to skate across the ice, drawing circles with their movements to break the ground under the enemy's feet, Pokemon Ranger style. It starts simple, and… remains simple. While the game does what Nitrome does best — introducing new enemies and mechanics, then mixing and matching, never letting anything fall by the wayside — the core problem here is that nothing ever feels like enough: most new enemies don’t do much to contend with how they all get taken out the same way, and most new mechanics aren’t generally more than a minor annoyance. There are things around the stage that give you points (just like the game Thin Ice is spinning off, Frost Bite) but also… nothing is stopping you from just going to get them? You get a bonus for collecting five letters spelling out BONUS, yet… because the arena is so small all the letters are usually, like, right beside one another. And when the game isn’t falling over for you… it’s usually being quite annoying, and generally not in a way that feels intended on the game’s part. Some enemies only become vulnerable after doing a certain attack but then you have to wait until they do their attack, and if they do it by the edge of the arena there’s not enough room for you to draw that circle around them so you have to wait for them to hopefully do it again in a place where you can actually interact with them. Obstacles in places where you can innocuously be trying to get an enemy when you touch their way huge hitbox, freeze you, and then send you careening into damage or another freeze obstacle. Enemies that go fast enough that it’s impossible to actually encircle them, either requiring you to do the circle ahead of time or attack ahead of time and hope they randomly clip into it and die. Enemies that clip directly into the edge of the arena and force you to restart the level. If I maybe enjoyed the game otherwise, then all those issues could be merely minor annoyances, but as is… when it’s not being annoying it’s too simple, too easy, a bit unmemorable to feel fun. And that could be fine, on its own, but as the game progresses, and these annoyances start to rear their heads, there’s nothing really there to counterbalance them, nothing to stop the cracks in the ice from spreading, and nothing to protect you from being hit full force by the cold once it all falls apart.

Compared to the pop culture behemoth it’d so quickly become, it’s easy to dismiss the first entries in the Pokèmon series as “having not aged well.” And perhaps there’s at least a little truth in that: as the first game in the series, many of the quality of life features present in later generations aren’t quite present, and are sorely missed. It’s certainly rather annoying to be perpetually in contention with the item limit, where often you’re going to have to drop things as routes and dungeons have more things on the floor than you’re ever going to have free space in your bag. It’s certainly rather finicky to have to manually go into the menu and select the HM move you want to use, and it’s certainly rather tedious to have to navigate the PC every time you’re suddenly required to use Cut. Pokèmon learn either every move or no moves, which not only makes training up something in the latter category feel like pulling teeth, but also makes a lot of the game's difficulty fold perhaps more easily than it should: the Ghost type, in particular, being incredibly adept in a player’s hands because so many Pokèmon only ever naturally learn normal type moves.

Not to mention how… it’s a game held together by duct tape and dreams. A type meant to be super-effective against another type actually doesn’t do any damage at all. The so-called “good” AI — an RNG stratagem given to important fights, meant to push them towards super effective moves and away from not very effective moves — is anything but, making it oh so easy to trap certain important fights in a loop because they failed to take into account whether the super effective move they’re programmed to prioritize actually does any damage. Sometimes when you get the catching tutorial and then go to Cinnabar Island you rip the game open, a malignant piece of code emerging from the shoreline, irreversibly corrupting the world around you, before then challenging you to a Pokèmon battle. Between the bugs, between the bits of design philosophy that took years to be iterated on, Pokèmon Red and Blue are more of a stepping stone: important to understand just what the appeal was and how the franchise took over the world, but perhaps, in the full context of what we have now, not the best Pokèmon games to actually play.

But that’s the thing: Pokèmon Red & Blue did not set out to be Pokèmon games, they set out to be RPGs. An RPG with a central mechanic that completely reimagines how said RPG gameplay traditionally works, yes, but an RPG nonetheless, and one that hews much closer mechanically, thematically to being one than any Pokèmon game afterward.

Because, on one hand, it would be easy to say the game folds to any player who knows what they’re doing. On the other hand, that’s coming from a world where you’ve gone through Kanto in so many other games. That’s with the years' worth of accumulated knowledge of the type chart — or the years spent playing games that’ll just tell you if a given move will be effective against another Pokèmon the moment they’re registered in your Pokèdex. Pokèmon Red and Blue, on the other hand, run under the impression that they’re the only games of their kind, for better or worse. Specifically, they kind of run under the old RPG paradigm where finding the way forward often required you to take in context clues, or often explore for exploring’s sake. Kanto is huge, and after a certain point, notably open-ended: moving forward only requires whatever you need to move forward, be that a key item, a HM, or the permission to use said HM. Once you beat Misty the game becomes one huge scavenger hunt, where you’re unlocking something that’ll unlock something that’ll unlock the way forward, and oftentimes, that whole process starts with you hearing what a random NPC has to say, or you just picking a direction and walking towards the horizon, hoping there’s maybe something on the other side.

This approach isn’t limited to merely what governs progress, either. The type chart, and the way certain Pokèmon evolve, while you can certainly find all this out in-game via brute force, exploring the region and listening to what people have to say tells you so much of what you might like to know. From the gym guide giving you the lowdown on what to expect as you go up to face your next challenge, from the guy in the Celadon Department Store who gets traded a Graveller and is shocked to see it evolve, to the random trainer on the seaside who informs you how Nidorino evolves via MOON STONE, you learn so much from the people you meet along the way, and you never know just who is going to give you the exact info you might happen to want. I love how indirect this can be, too: for example, how the positioning of the Fighting Dojo relative to Saffron City’s gym tells you about how Fighting types are weak to Psychic, or Diglett's cave giving you the exact tools you need to beat the gym right next to it. If I got to have all my memories taken of a certain thing, a chance to go through the whole game blind once again… I’m not sure Pokèmon Red would actually be the pick, but man, is it up there. I love how, theoretically, the road to progress is marked by exploration, through interaction, through solving the giant fetch-quest that makes up the Kanto region. It’d be awesome to see how that all works in practice.

What I also love about the more RPG-inspired design is how nearly all the Pokèmon you encounter serve some sort of clear mechanical purpose. They’re not just cute little creatures you sic onto other people’s cute little creatures, they lean into the RPG design philosophy too, and often have a clear role in how the game is constructed. Brock’s Onix and Misty’s Starmie aren’t just each leader’s ace, they’re boss fights: who, should you know where to look later on, you can then adopt into your own team, Shin Megami Tensei style. The Dragon and Ghost types, while they play rather oddly in further generations, make sense here when they each only have one representative: the player needing to figure out what works and what doesn’t against Ghost types for them to reach the top of the Pokèmon Tower (nevermind how you need to do another dungeon to perceive them in the first place) and the Dragon type’s notable strength compared to everything else makes sense when they’re only used by the most powerful member of the Elite 4, thus making sure what the player thinks is the final boss is not a battle you can merely cheese with type advantage. Voltorb and Electrode are this game’s take on the Mimic. Mewtwo is this game’s take on your typical RPG superboss. Zapdos is the boss — and reward — of an optional dungeon, whereas its brethren in Articuno and Moltres are rewards for delving into the Seafoam Islands and Victory Road deeper than the player ever needs to. While mons like Butterfree and Beedrill emerge from their chrysalis early, and are rather powerful for the point in the game you get them, they both fall off curve hard once you start encountering other evolved mons, imparting a lesson in the player that sometimes growing up is letting go of the things you used to cherish. In the same vein, while it quickly plateaus into merely being as good as everything around it, Dugtrio is a godsend for the part of the game where you can stumble across him, going up to level 31 when most everything around you struggles to pass level 20, and singlehandedly allowing you to bypass what could be a difficult boss battle with Lt. Surge. Mankey (at least from Yellow onwards) is an early method of mitigating Brock should you have picked (or forced into) a starter that’s weak to his Rock types. While rather rare Pokèmon like Porygon, Farfetch’d or Lickitung aren’t quite worth the effort it takes to obtain them, that’s partially the point — they’re merely the more tricky steps in the process of catching them all, and the game is nice enough to put the Pokèmon more useful in terms of beating the game right in plain sight. While later generations would mostly shy away from this idea (though with some individual exceptions), the original set of Pokèmon games, even today, stands out for how it makes certain Pokèmon fill specific mechanical roles, and from a game design perspective it's fascinating to see in action, to try and guess what the idea is behind each member of the original 151.

I like how the game counterbalances its kid empowerment plot with its loose coming of age themes. Like, it’s super cool to imagine yourself at ten years old taking on and beating an entire criminal gang, but the game itself addresses that this doesn’t meaningfully stop them: even if you foil whatever caper they’re up to today, that’s not gonna keep them from doing whatever they’re going to do next. Even Giovanni, the last time you fight him, says that this won’t be the end of Team Rocket, and I think it’s this kind of, like, kid’s storytelling of singlehandedly saving the day by sailing through the bad guys’ hideout, combined with the reality of how organized crime is like the hydra growing new heads and that you can't ever meaningfully put them in the ground, that really stands out as a somewhat notable plot beat. I love the loose implication that you’re growing older as you go through the region: your rival’s sprite continually changing each time you catch up with him, starting off as a little kid yet clearly looking so much taller by the final time the both of you fight. I too love the way your path through Kanto more than likely loops you back to Pallet Town right near the end: what once was your home becoming just a quick pitstop, a quick moment to say hi to your mum, before you’re off on your way to Viridian for your last gym badge. For games that don’t necessarily focus on a clear-cut plot beyond the premise — probably in part because of Kanto’s more open-ended progression — there’s a decent amount put into theming here, at least from what I could extrapolate. Maybe I’m just reading a lot from a little (though given Professer Oak saying "You have come of age! You've grown so much older since you left Pallet Town so long ago" upon beating the champion I'm fairly sure that theme was a conscious inclusion), but the fact that the game is capable of evoking those themes so continuously I felt was rather worth note, and a loose highlight of the experience.

There are some other things I quite liked: the music is so continuously stellar, and iconic for a reason. Playing this on a system where the game had backlighting let me see the towns in the hues they’re named after, providing a rather pretty visual shorthand of where the player is at any given time. Overall… I’m never quite going to have that special connection with this particular Pokèmon game that others might have — I never had a Gameboy as a kid, my first Pokèmon experience was a couple of generations down the line — so all I’m gonna see is something… with perhaps a bit less polish than what I’m typically used to with a Pokèmon game, but even then there’s so much here that’s so cool to look at. The non-linear, old-school RPG design. How each individual Pokèmon does something for the overall construction of the game. Narrative theming that, um, perhaps takes a bit for the series to attempt again. Maybe it’s a little buggy, a little bit of a relic quality-of-life wise compared to the juggernaut it’d later become… but this was the thing that ignited the craze in the first place, and there was certainly a reason it managed to do so.

Fears to Fathom: Ironbark Lookout asks an important question: what if public bathrooms didn’t have any toilets? What if there was instead a room where everybody has to piss on the floor?

…Playing this game before there were any patches was maybe not the greatest idea. In addition to the restaurant piss room mentioned above (where the toilet I was meant to pee in did not have a visible model), my playthrough was fairly marred by glitches and other technical issues. On the default graphics settings the game can’t handle itself: things slow to a crawl, and there’s this motion blur when looking around which is rather sickening to have to deal with. Setting them lower doesn’t help, either: all it does is make the lighting so bright as to be painful, and the game still didn’t seem to be capable of handling its rather expansive areas. Not to mention the glitches: how I got softlocked at one point because my attempt to put down something it turned out I’d later need clipped through the floor and out of bounds, and how you’re not fast enough to be able to clear the final chase… unless you move diagonally, zigzagging somehow being faster than just… running normally. I was excited to play this game upon its release — as I’d really liked the previous games in the series and wanted to go into one of them blind — but I think, maybe, I needed to wait a bit longer, because the issues that hadn’t been patched out yet were enough to effect my overall enjoyment of the game.

Which is a bit of a shame, because otherwise I liked a lot of what this game had to offer. What this series in particular excels at is managing to capture how it feels to be where you are: both the natural horror that can come out of the situation you’re in… and also the serene, the pretty, the parts that… almost feel like home. Namely, I’m struck by the picture it captures of national park life: all the routines you have to go through each night, all the times you have to upend everything because somebody in the park did something they’re not supposed to, becoming friends with a disembodied voice on the radio, and how you slowly make your assigned firetower yours: opening and closing the shutters each night, throwing all your shit through the floor across the place, and slowly getting a familiarity of the space around you as the days go by. It’s a surprisingly comfy game, even as things start building up around you, and frankly it made me wonder if I’d personally be into the park ranger life. It plays well with the horror aspects, as the intrusions on your idyllic park ranger life turn from normal to absolutely not, and even if… I do have some questions about whether this really is a true story somebody sent in, I can’t deny that it otherwise works. Even if I should’ve waited before I otherwise experienced it for myself. 8/10.

Well, the good times had to end at some point.

A shame, given the… loosely upward trajectory the previous two games had taken. Like, okay, these games certainly never reached good: whatever attempts at being scary or delving into the Deep Lore come off as more goofy than anything, and genuinely it feels like the gameplay is solely focused on making the game run as long as possible to skirt the steam two-hour refund threshold. But even despite that, there were at least… signs of promise, in amongst the muck. They made some of the gameplay sections loosely fun. They mostly made the padding just having you backtrack through super long hallways, which, you know, isn’t particularly amazing, but it’s at least inoffensive: the game could, and had, been doing worse about it. They even found a way to be loosely funny without just spouting the same meme lines over and over again. Everything was looking up.

And then this game began with a first-person platforming segment and I could feel all my goodwill slip away.

Garten of Banban 6, tragically, returns to Garten of Banban 2’s method of trying to run out the timer: physically barring your progress through tedious puzzles, sections that go on for just incredibly long, and forcing you right back to the beginning every time you mess it up. Nothing as awful as 2’s killboxes, but man, do they try. Your core mechanic is that you need to use your drone to light up the ground around you as you head from landmark to landmark, as stepping into the dark is Dangerous now (but only certain kinds of darkness, other types of darkness are completely fine despite it looking exactly the same)... except the landmarks immediately start being too far away for you to see through the darkness, forcing you to kinda just fumble around and hope you’re going in the correct direction. There’s this one segment where you have to push switches to move lights to protect your partner while he does… something, and you get told to do 20 things at once and also the instructions are incredibly unclear and all the buttons you have to press are just so confusing as to what they do. It wasn’t difficult, not once I got the hang of it, but I died multiple times there primarily because I had no clue what I was even doing.

Which is a theme. Honestly, I reckon the devs did a “good” job at ensuring the player has absolutely no clue what they're even doing. There’s the usual stuff of hiding items, buttons you need to press, making the player scour the entire room to try and figure out what they’re even looking for, but this episode seems to go another level with it. I already mentioned the stuff with having to light your way to each waypoint, but there are other highlights. Puzzles where the first step is deciphering what it is you’re even looking at. Sections where the reward for solving them isn’t immediately obvious, making you wonder whether the game just moved the goalposts or if you just need to find whatever just dropped somewhere. Nothing is ever straightforward. Presumably, every second the player spends confused about what they’re even meant to do is one more second the player is spending in-game. Frankly, I think the developers of this game should make an out-and-out masocore platformer at this point. They clearly have a knack for it.

It’s still rather humorous, though, and not just the game’s attempts at being serious and scary. Honestly, even having gone through all of the above, I found it all funny, rather than frustrating. Maybe not in a tire-fire sort of way — it’s all too clear that there’s a degree of intentionality behind all of this — more bemused, more “oh my god what the fuck are they gonna do this time.” I understand that I am one of the few people who continue to believe the joke is funny (it seems like this game, in particular, is where people both dropped and swore off) but either way, even with the dropoff, I’m still onboard. It is a pity that this entry went downhill, though. Now I guess anything subsequent could go anywhere. 2/10.

I’ve found, oftentimes, when a work exists relative to another work — be it a sequel, adaptation, etc. — that the general audience has a tendency to judge it purely by its relation to the original. “Loyalty” becomes the touchstone for which the work is defined, and should it feel significantly different from the original, or change things in adaptation, it’ll be decried as a bad work compared to the original, regardless of its actual quality separated from that context. Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs, from what I understand, was no stranger to this type of reception. On its original release, in 2013, it was criticized for feeling much more stripped back compared to what it was following up on. Core mechanics that defined Amnesia: The Dark Descent, such as managing your inventory, fueling your light source, and making sure you don’t lose your sanity were not present within Machine For Pigs, in an attempt to gear the game as more of a narrative experience, as was the modus operandi of primary developer The Chinese Room. It was a tall order — especially given just how popular and influential The Dark Descent was for indie horror — and sadly reception proved to be rather mixed because of that. What the general audience wanted was something reminiscent of the original work, and when the process of creating a follow-up resulted in something far different, it was rejected: not on its own merits, but because of outside expectations that this work didn’t entirely cater to.

So it’s a little funny on my end that of all the Amnesia titles, this is the one random chance chose for me to play first. Having not played, or even watched much of anything else to do with the series, I’m coming into this divorced from a lot of the context or outside expectations that surrounded the game on its release. I wouldn’t necessarily feel this game to be stripped back in terms of mechanics, since I never had an understanding of those mechanics in the first place. I wouldn’t think about this game in comparison to the original Amnesia… mostly because I prefer to view things on their own merits, but because I came into the experience absent any previous experience. It’s far from the first game in the series (especially if you consider Amnesia as a spiritual sequel to Penumbra), but, personally, this one would be my first foray into it, and, likely, the blueprint for what I'd expect to see should I delve further into this series.

You play as Osmund Mandus, a wealthy industrialist, who wakes up from a coma of several months right on the last day of the 19th century (or, well, actually a year from the last day of the 19th century, but shhhhhh) to find that his two children are nowhere to be found. His search takes him through his manor, through the streets and sewers of Victorian London, listening to the directions of a mysterious man on the telephone who tells him he knows where his sons are. He’s eventually led into one of his factories, and through this factory, towards a machine of unknown aim and infinite proportions. As he gets closer, however, Osmund finds that the workers of the machine are anything but human, and that he might know more about the machine than he seems to think...

I think this game’s strongest point was its narrative. I think the writing did a good job of getting me to know and like the characters, and I was particularly into the varied, wild directions the plot happened to go. Beyond how effective it is at building up a mystery — and drip-feeding the player information as it slowly unfurls — I think what I really loved is that this is a story that operates on multiple textual levels. While you’re fully capable of taking the game at face value without really feeling like you’re missing out on anything, this is something that begs to be read a little deeper. Particularly, one can question how literal the events going on even are, with a knowledge of Victorian England potentially providing an indication that the events that are depicted… perhaps could be interpreted as a metaphor for something much less fantastical. I made a point to look up plot details after the game specifically because I wanted to know more, which to me I’d say is a compliment as to how much this game made me want to think about it.

As a horror game, I’d also say it’s solidly effective. The nighttime environments feel suitably dark without it being absolutely impossible to see anything (which, believe me, so many games can’t seem to get right). There’s a subtle sense — through how the sounds you keep hearing are the only things that break through the silence, how empty the streets of London are — that something is wrong from the start, driving the core mystery and providing an aura of unease as you delve deeper through the game. I’m also into the way things… escalate as the game goes on: from down to earth as you explore your mansion, then veering into the fantastical as the monsters begin to show up, then more and more off the rails the further you delve into the heart of the machine. The sections with monsters are simple, but effective stealth sections, with their presence feeling imposing enough to make the player not want to mess up. When you’re caught, or when the game dispenses with the idea of stealth, enemies are loud as they rush you down, inspiring a blind panic as you try to figure out how you’re meant to get away. It’s the little things that contribute to a horror game’s atmosphere — and mean just as much as any big setpiece or scare — and in regards to the micro level, I think this game does pretty well on that front.

Where it falters, I feel, is mostly in direct gameplay. Less the ‘walking simulator’ aspect, more when the game throws puzzles at you. They’re mostly fine, but what it really suffers from is a lack of… indication of how your actions affect the world around you. Oftentimes, I’d solve a puzzle, the game would acknowledge that I solved a puzzle… and then I’d have no clue what to do next, either the puzzle requiring an extra step that wasn’t quite clear (at one point I thought the game had glitched and softlocked me), or because the game has issues with signposting where exactly the player needs to go. There were so many points where the game was like “walk down the path we’ve set for you” but the path was in a large enough area that I got lost, or the way forward was absolutely coated in darkness that I couldn’t see it. I kept looking at guides, not for any of the puzzles, but for a lot of what was in-between, when it… really did not feel like that was what the game had intended, nor something that particularly felt like a ‘me’ problem.

Other than that — and divorced from whatever context that might have given me different expectations, or any sort of in-built comparison — I felt that this was a fairly solid narrative game. While a lot of the gameplay, and most of the segments where I was walking from place to place, felt like they could’ve been made more clear, I felt the horror to be rather effective, and the story to be something super worth delving into and interpreting. As my personal first experience with this series, I felt like this was a fairly decent introduction. Can't wait to be shocked that the next game in the series has actual mechanics. 6/10.

Novel, interesting… goes on roughly twice the length it should. When I started playing I was rather quickly impressed by how the sled dog gameplay made movement feel: the deliberate finickiness of the anchor whenever you wanted to stop and start, how important it is to lean your character in a particular direction to prevent the sled from tipping over. I also love how expansive the areas you go through are, and not only how easy it is to get lost, but how easy it is to find your way again, the poles all over the arctic wilderness installing a sense of familiarity and direction and allowing you to make it to your destination from anywhere. I liked the way the story was presented: how quickly you cue into its non-linear nature, how you start to piece things together, how the mystery builds up to what feels like a major reveal… and then the game keeps going for 30 more minutes. You’re put into new section after new section, each one feeling like ‘okay, the game has to end here, right?’ and then it keeps on going. And it never really feels like you actually get anything out of these segments, no extra context, nothing you haven’t already learned. Maybe if there was more added to the plot, or maybe if the reveals felt staggered throughout the game rather than the last one being about halfway through, it could’ve ran its runtime better, but as is it feels like it peaks early and then it’s just going through the motions from that point on. Willing to give this game a bit of the benefit of the doubt given that I played it right after another game put me in a rather foul mood, but I think even if that hadn’t happened I would’ve had the same takeaway: neat idea, executed well, but also this does not have the runtime to fill an hour. 6/10.

The viral success of Hideo Kojima’s 2014 game PT — like any innovation, or new breaking of the ground in the confines of a genre — brought forward a slew of imitators who… didn’t quite understand what made the original work as well as it did. On one hand, a part of the attraction of PT is its novelty: a lot of the things it did, such as the looping hallway (and how things change between each rendition of the loop), were genuinely revolutionary for the time. And while you’re fully allowed to wear your influences on your sleeves, if you just deploy elements of it without much of a critical eye as to how to make it yours, not only do you doom your thing to being derivative, but it also prompts diminishing returns: familiarity breeding contempt, a joke becoming less and less funny the more times its repeated, etc etc. Another part of the core appeal to PT — and one I feel really can’t be emulated — is its mystique, and its sort of status as a lost media: PT in itself was never meant to be a standalone experience, it was a taste test for a something more that never came to be, deleted off the Playstation store to the point where the only way one can actually experience PT is through YouTube playthroughs. To create a ‘full version’ of PT, or to create your own version of it feels oxymoronic: because a lot of the actual appeal in it is how it’s ultimately an incomplete experience, and by trying to fill in the gaps, all you’re really doing is making your emulation of it incomplete, just in a much different, less evocative way.

Of course, that’s not the only reason PT is as effective as it is. Another core part of how it works is pacing, and overall length: PT hits the ground running and does everything it wants to do in ~20 minutes. None of that time is wasted, there’s never really a moment where the player’s not doing anything of note, you’re on for a ride, from beginning to end, and… the game never repeats itself. There’s a veritable bag of cool tricks that the game’s willing to show to its player, but any of those given tricks is only shown once before the game then moves on to something else. A non-zero amount of these clones up the runtime, which in addition to often introducing issues with the pacing (by, say, adding loops where nothing happens, or by doing the same particular scare again, and again, and again,), can often lead the game to wear out whatever welcome it had. Layers of Fear, the debut (not counting DS ports of other games) effort from Polish studio Bloober Team… quite freely professes to be inspired by PT, and attempts to take what it did and try to create a ‘full experience’ out of it. To its credit, despite the three-hour runtime, it doesn’t wear out its welcome. If, mainly, because it never quite gives much of a welcome in the first place.

You play as a once-famous painter (with his life in ruins after initially unspecified events) dedicated to creating his masterpiece. However, to make his masterpiece he has to collect inspiration for it first, and so must explore your house, navigating the constantly changing corridors, uncovering the layers of who this painter really is, all in service to create a painting befitting of your talent. I’ll give this game credit: the story itself functions, for the most part. It’s not revolutionary, but it presents a nice little mystery that digs into the little details and… genuinely did not do what I expected it to do, and that compliment is only half-backhanded. The lack of initial context given beyond ‘you were a famous painter but also damn, bitch, you live like this?’ does a good job at… painting a picture, but not a complete one, and with each progression in the plot a little more gets filled in until eventually you get a full grasp on who you are, what’s going on, and why you’re doing what you’re doing. I’m also a fan of the visual design of the house — it nails the old-timey decrepit mansion aesthetic perfectly, and I like the way the game represents the whole ‘the hallways move’ thing. There are landmarks, and specific rooms you return to, but there’s no frame of reference to where anything is, and it really captures the feeling of, like, stumbling around, drunk, knowing that you should know where you are despite feeling hopelessly lost… then making it to a place you recognize and finally feeling it all click together.

It’s a shame, for as much as walking through the mansion feels decently atmospheric… the actual act of playing the game falls far, far more flat. The game is effectively a ‘walking simulator’ — a game where the focus is on the narrative, and where player interactivity is rather limited — but it feels more like one of those Newgrounds flash games where you click around a room aimlessly until eventually you trigger a jumpscare and you get to move on. The entire game experience is walking down corridors and then walking around in place until the game opens up another corridor for you to go down, and it never feels like you’re uncovering anything, working towards a specific goal, or anything that provides more motivation for the player to actively want to move forward. There’s the occasional puzzle — sometimes a key you have to find, or a code you have to enter — and, to this game’s cr- oh literally the answer is just displayed on that wall over there, so much for having to maybe actually work for my progress. Whatever blocks your progress is very minimal. And whatever happens while you’re progressing is very minimal. Theoretically — given that the story fragments are mostly just crumbs gated behind said progression — this would allow for the horror of this game to take the front stage, but…

…I’m sorry, but this game isn’t really scary at all. I know that that’s subjective — I’m sure, at the time of release, there were so many YouTubers proclaiming this to be the SCARIEST GAME EVER?????? — but the effort made here to try and scare the player feels so lacking. Jumpscares just happen. There’s no buildup, there’s nothing really… disturbing it tries to evoke, you’re just trying to look around a room or walk down a hallway when something an object moves and there’s a music cue and there’s really no reaction I ever had to them other than “uh, okay, moving on.” The game is fond of using the same tricks over and over again — doors opening only to reveal brick walls behind them, the player falling through the floor — which, even beyond how each reuse provides diminishing returns, just kind of proves to show how few tricks the game has in the first place, and how ineffective they feel. I’m not one to use ‘it’s not scary’ as a criticism — what’s ‘scary’ is subjective, and on my end I mostly respond more to things that are stressful than scary — but here, that’s what it comes down to. A lot of the game hinges on it being scary: it’s what the atmosphere of the house is building up to, it’s the connective tissue between the story crumbs, but it falls so flat. The scares are limp, cookie-cutter, and even if they weren’t taken from other games that… did what this was trying to do way more effectively and concisely, they don’t work on their own merit. They’re too low-effort in application, and whatever could have maybe been effective is diluted and washed out by poor execution and copious repetition.

In essence… well, the essence is “we wanted to do our own PT!” which… in itself set the game up for failure from the word go, but even besides that… this wasn’t particularly potent. There’s potential in the story, and I quite enjoyed the environmental design, but from the simplistic and aimless nature of the gameplay and the game’s utter incapability to provide a single effective scare… the layers only go skin deep. What you see is what you get. And what I saw… sure did not impress me. 3/10.

When I played the first Garten of Banban, I found it… not particularly worth the ire. Was it good? Not particularly, but its faults — and its shameless attempts to copy Poppy Playtime — were more funny to me than anything, and not quite capable of manifesting any particular hatred. It’s short, it’s mostly whatever, and the only role it has to play in the commercialization of ‘mascot horror’ is merely just being the most blatant about it. The idea that it (at the time of writing) is considered the 10th 11th worst game of all time, more than anything, is a sign that maybe people need to play more bad games, and that bandwagons can easily catapult something far past wherever it otherwise should be. I can understand feeling that Garten of Banban is a 1/10 because it has nothing to offer — frankly, that’s where I should probably put it. I’m much more confused at the idea that it’s a game that inspires frothing hatred, worth being considered the death of an entire genre, worth the harassment of the devs off social media. There’s just not enough there to really inspire anything passionate.

Garten of Banban II, on the other hand…

…exists solely, blatantly, to waste your time. There’s a throughline, sure — you go down deeper into the depths of the facility, you get your first glimpses of the Deep Lore as the real horror begins — but it's not nearly enough to sustain the full length of the game. Tragically, however, Steam’s refund settings allow people to buy a game, beat it, and then get their money back if they can do it in two hours. The devs didn’t want that to happen to them, so they padded the game out as much as they could to try and prevent that. Which: I don’t blame them, there’s been some history of indie developers not making back their budgets for otherwise well-received games because of people abusing the Steam refund system, I fully understand wanting to avoid that same thing yourself. I feel like there are much smoother ways of achieving this goal without compromising the quality of your work, especially if you’re releasing your game episodically, but I guess, in lieu of any better ideas, this idea works as well as any.

But god does that make this painful to play. The game does everything to make sure that runtime goes over the two-hour mark. Part of this is by natural padding: adding sections that mean nothing, that contribute nothing to the story, that make the whole thing disjointed and kind of aimless. Maybe there’s a concrete beginning, middle, and end in there somewhere, but it’s like an anime with constant, pervasive filler: so much content for the sake of stalling for time that it dilutes and gets in the way of whatever it is that actually moves things forward. It’s not good content, either. It’s clunky, it’s unclear (you’ll have no idea how you’re meant to interact with puzzle elements even if you know, step by step, what you’re meant to do), and it’s not particularly fair. Which is how it pads the runtime out, partially, since your autosaved checkpoints will send you far back before the point where you actually died. Fail the comically long first-person platformer segment (which has no relevance to the greater anything) because this game wasn’t built to be a platformer? Do it all over again. Get killed by the giant bird in a situation that still doesn’t take advantage of its theoretically interesting bird-of-prey AI? Sorry, you gotta collect all the babies again, and the controls for it aren’t any better this time than it was the first time. Fail the classroom segment because it’s all trial and error where one mistake is instant death? Hope you don’t mind not being able to skip the dialogue. It’s so genuinely frustrating. And so much more so when it’s so evident there’s no greater purpose beyond using up more of your time.

It runs like shit, too. Like, generally I’m not someone who super cares about PC performance stuff — if something lags or has graphical hiccups that’s more on me for playing it on PC — but that’s for, like, high-end stuff. Not Garten of Banban. Why is there so much motion blur? Why can’t I turn it off? Why is the framerate so bad as to be actually sickening to look at? Initially I shrugged and just turned everything down… but it still lagged, and now everything was so dark and low saturation that it’s impossible to see the things you need to interact with. A solid tenth of the game was literally me futzing with the graphics settings to see if I could stop it from chugging, and this is on a decently high-end gaming laptop, so preeeeetty sure it’s not my fault, there. It’s not even just an issue of “the game is normal but laggy,” certain sections are so much harder because they don’t run well. If you turn the lighting down too low (and you have to if you want it to run) you legitimately can't see anything: the buttons you need to press to open a door, the specific corridors you need to go down during a chase scene. There’s this part where you have to grab a bunch of baby birds and put them in a nest, but also the lag makes it so hard to catch them, both because they weave and turn in a way that makes it so genuinely hard to corner them and also because the lag makes it hard to tell if you’ve caught one: so many times I caught then immediately let them go. It was painful. The whole game was painful.

…It’s still not a 1/10, though, and this time, it’s because there’s a little bit of merit in the writing. Not necessarily the plot, or the lore — I didn’t care about those — but… there’s a little penchant for what feels like anti-humour that genuinely, almost made me smile a little bit. The whole section in the classroom, gameplay issues aside, was genuinely kind of funny, whether for the intended reason or not. “It’s okay to have no friends and be miserable like me!” is a quote that has genuinely stuck in my head at least once every couple days since playing this. It doesn’t save the game, even remotely — it plays like shit and it runs like shit all just to try and get past Steam’s refund thresholds — but, having heard that episodes three and onward start to lean into the joke a bit more… I have decent faith, given what works here, that maybe I’ll have a bit more fun when I eventually yeet myself back into the mines. Just not right now. Because going through this put me in a bad, bad mood. 2/10.

Before having actually played Mario: The Music Box, most of what I knew was that it was a fairly standard RPG Maker horror game… which made the strange decision of starring the Super Mario Bros, of all people. Having now been able to play it myself, I have to say… yeah what an absolutely baffling choice. Like, way to just completely undercut the serious horror tone you’re going for. It’s hard to take the descriptions of all your gruesome fates so seriously when the main character is making Mario noises as he gets impaled through the throat. It’s hard to really read the interactions between you and the very edgy and serious original characters the way the developer intended when they’re anime OCs and Mario is precisely half their size. Maybe if it leaned into the premise a little and treated it in more of a… black comedy sort of way (watch Mario die over and over and over and over-) but as it stands it’s… caught in a little bit of a catch-22: Mario being the main character undercuts everything the tone is going for, but were Mario not in this game at all… there wouldn’t really be much notable about this, honestly.

The plot follows Mario, of the Super Mario Bros as he investigates an abandoned house on the edges of the Mushroom Kingdom. Upon finding a mysterious music box, Mario soon finds zombie ghosts converging in on him, and he now cannot leave this place. Now he, Luigi, and The Third Mario Brother Byakuya Togami a stranger named Riba must find a way through the horrors of the house, with danger lurking along every corner the game explicitly warns you not to go down. Amidst it, one particular entity places its sight on Mario, and what follows is a conflict: one for Mario’s body, and one for Mario’s sanity………………………………………………………..

I’ll give this game credit: there’s an insane amount of effort put into it. That’s not a “you tried” sort of thing: the production value in this game is insane. Every story event, ending, and death has multiple hand-illustrated CGs visually depicting whatever’s happening. There are precisely 559 of these — multiple for each event — and they do a lot to show what’s happening, beyond the limits of what you can do with RPGmaker (unless you’re really good at sprite animation) and helping make each death feel, theoretically, that much more impactful. The sprite art, both for the characters and the general environment, is fairly aesthetically pleasing, even if the low saturation made seeing certain things sort of a pain. There are also, like, just straight-up custom animations made in the same style as the CG, both for… a Kingdom Hearts or When They Cry-esque opening video and also for a fully stylized RPG boss fight in one of the endings. Even with games such as Ib or The Witch’s House, most of what they had was limited to pixel art and ways to play around RPGMaker limitations. This… goes on a whole different level in terms of production value, and you can really tell that this game was made by an artist.

…You can also tell, however, that this game wasn’t made by a writer. This goes beyond the whole “story expects to be taken deathly seriously while also starring Mario” thing. For as much as the art works to make the many deaths you suffer feel evocative, the writing… does the opposite. Characters just matter-of-factly describe the way they die, and the sameyness (and also clunkiness) of these descriptions does a lot to undercut how varied and sometimes visceral these death sequences can be. Maybe if they were shorter, and leaned towards the visuals rather than the written, then they’d be more effective, but as stands most of them felt drawn out and kinda clunky. The plot, too, for as seriously it takes itself, has… issues. There’s a lot of characters (and also through this a lot of characters who just… drop out of the narrative) a lot of re-explanations of things the game forgot it already told the player, and a lot of cases where… the narrative doesn’t really have the effect it’s intending. Like, yes, this person who murdered their entire extended family because she wanted to be immortal like her boyfriend sure is actually a sympathetic victim of society. The titular music box… sure does matter a lot in the story. Ultimately, like, yes, it is incredibly silly that this story stars the Mario Brothers… but even if that wasn't there to undercut everything I really don't think this plot and story would be able to stand on its own.

And game-design wise… it’s no Ib or Witch’s House. The area design… leans linear, but areas are large enough that at points it’s easy to get lost on what you’re meant to do next. Puzzles… are mostly the sort of bread and butter “put a key in this keyhole to put a key into another keyhole-” that… doesn’t really feel all that unique or fun to play out — honestly, most of the puzzles I saw here were already things I’d seen in other games. Deaths are… very telegraphed: rather than the sudden, brutal ends you’d receive even if you thought you were going the right way, you’re kind of blatantly suggested that you shouldn’t go down this path and if you do then you get an overtly prolonged description as to why the obvious mistake was, in fact, a mistake. They’re also a little samey in that regard: literally every time you deal with a possessed person the answer is to violence the ghost out of them. Every time you're given the option to try to jump — y'know, like Mario is oft to do — it fails and you die. In terms of RPGMaker horror games it’s on the less ingenious end, and that could be fine… but I think the specific horror gameplay tropes they lean into are kind of the more irritating ones to deal with.

And in the end, when… a lot of the individual elements don’t really hold under scrutiny, and the only thing that particularly stands out in the first place is the strange decision to use Mario as the main protagonist, it’s easy to tell how this game has the little bit of infamy it has. And while there would be a way to make these particular ideas work, here… they don’t. Not in the way the developer intended. 4/10.

To reiterate from when I first reviewed this: I’m no fan of ‘parody’ visual novels — and how they tend to gobble up media attention from brethren that are aiming for something beyond ‘haha, it’s meant to be bad!’ cynicism — but this sticks the landing. For a couple of reasons: even beyond the fairly solid production values, even beyond how regardless of the ‘dating sim the Old Gods!’ veneer it's a fairly solid adaptation of the mythos and characters it's drawing off, what it does best is how beyond the visual novel elements it plays more like an adventure game than anything else. A pretty solid one, too. Rather than making choices or picking dialogue, progress is gated primarily by the things you do in gameplay: mixing and matching all the different things in your apartment to perform all the different rituals, as well as taking in context clues to figure out the order of operations for certain endings. It’s fun to play, a… not terrible lead-in to cosmic horror for those unacquainted with it (and having some cute references for anyone who does have that innate familiarity)... but maybe, perhaps, doesn’t feel as polished as it could be. The UI tends to get in its own way: accidentally grabbing items when you meant to move the screen around, closing the ritual book when you're trying to speak an incantation. There are… enough typos for me to notice it as a consistent problem, to the point where this really would have benefitted from an edit pass. I like the final section a good bit — how genuinely stressful it manages to feel for a game that’s been pretty light on difficulty beforehand — but it goes on for way too long and sends you all the way back for failure, not helped by how finicky it feels to drag your mouse across the screen and speak out spells. It doesn’t dilute too hard from the core of the gameplay, and it manages to theme itself around its cosmic horror influences in a way that thankfully doesn’t feel like it’s just going ‘haha… what if there was a dating sim where you kissed Cthulhu???’, I just think maybe that there are certain things here that stop it from being great rather than good, and that a bit more time spent on certain aspects of the game could’ve done a lot to bridge that particular gap.

Cute! A bit confusing at first — I reset the game several times because one of the computer parts seemed to not work even if replaced but that might’ve been me not quite understanding the differences between the parts — but once I figured out how everything worked I got really into this. There’s a lot it wants to say, about the interconnectivity between the physical and online worlds, about all the weirdos in the online communities you join, and the ouroborus of online gaming — the consumption of content for consumption’s sake, and the question of when exactly something stops being fulfilling — and it talks about it well and it talks about it in an understated way: maybe pushing you in a certain direction, but letting the player come to their own conclusions about what exactly they want to take from it. I liked the way the game navigates its two worlds, and how it manages to do two separate things with the exact same engine and gameplay conceits between them. Specifically I kind of liked the scavengey explorer gameplay of the raccoon world, and I like how the game-within-a-game really nails that… empty, yet still addicting feel that’s clearly maybe not actually fun, yet it hits the right spots in your brain hard enough to make you want to keep playing despite the uneven returns. Overall this was neat! It’s short, and once you clue into how the gameplay in the raccoon world works there’s some really neat stuff it has to say. Would recommend this!