Having gone through… so much of Nitrome’s back catalogue over… oh wow it’s been a year at this point? time fucking flies, man. But anyway what strikes me is how little I stuck with a bunch of these games — and, in particular how little I played of their… pre-2008 output. In hindsight, it makes sense: my ability to access the internet pre-the-age-of-ten was limited to whenever I’d completed my work early in the computer lab, or whenever we went through the back fence to my aunt’s place every Friday afternoon. Oftentimes I’d go full weeks in between playing games — not to mention how different computers would mean different save files, resetting my progress to the beginning each time — and oftentimes those gaps often meant I had some new toy that took precedence over the Nitrome game I’d already gone through: a new Poptropica island, maybe, or some new website like Crazymonkey.com or the Bubblegum Arcade. My impression is, a lot of times, I’d pick something up, give it my best shot, then never play it again, save for a couple I’d return to, a couple (like Frost Bite or Hot Air 2 or Off The Rails) that stuck around my memory. But even then, there was nothing here I was super gung-ho about beating, nothing here I’d super try to revisit.

Until this one: Dirk Valentine. I can’t begin to tell you just why this game was what kid me latched onto, why this one was what truly began the process of making him a Nitromehead — iirc my family didn’t get access to home internet until, like, January 2009 at the earliest — but god it got its claws in me. It was my first exposure to steampunk, and with no Horrible Histories to tell me otherwise, this was just what I assumed the Victorian era was like. It was my first exposure to the Wilhelm Scream, and even back then eight-year-old-me knew that was the funniest shit ever — he’d shoot enemies that weren’t even in his way just so he had a chance to hear that soundbyte again. He loved the core gameplay conceit: how the chaingun you wield is both your main way of fighting enemies and your main method of getting through the level. He loved bouncing shots off the walls, he loved making those weird webs of ricocheted chains that he could jump up and climb. He loved all the mechanics the game kept introducing, all the enemies, all the ways they impacted the chaingun. It gave me the brainworms, long, long before that word even entered my vernacular… yet I was never able to beat it. I made it far, near the end, but there was always one level I couldn’t beat. I was eight, I was nine, I was ten, and I’d keep coming back, keep thinking maybe this would be the moment I was good enough of a gamer to get through my plateau, but it never came to be. I’d reach whatever level it was that walled me (I can’t quite remember but it was probably Control Room 1) and I wouldn’t be able to beat the game before computer time was over, before next week gave me something else to fixate on. It was… certainly important in the context of my history with flash games, yet I never actually beat it. I never actually saved Queen Victoria from the evil Baron Battenburg.

At least, not until today.

…Playing the game again, in 2024, with whatever wisdom the past sixteen years have or haven't given me, what I’ve realized is that this is a fairly major step forward, at least in the context of Nitrome’s progression as a studio. This is their first game to have a proper story — or at least, more of a story than a ‘congratulations, you beat the game!’ screen and maybe a quick intro cutscene — your mission control’s consistent chiming in doing a lot to lend a sense of context and gravitas to your actions, even if, perhaps, his dialogue could’ve used some commas. I like, too, that the background changes as you go outside the fortress to inside then back to outside again: it’s baby steps compared to some of Nitrome’s later stuff (simply adding a filter to the outside background and then taking it out again), but it helps lend a sense of overall progression as you fight through the titular Fortress of Steam. Beyond that, a lot of what kid me found fun about it still applies today: how cool it is that your gun makes this both a shooter and a platformer, all the cool things the game explores with that mechanic, and how… frenetic the game grows to be, especially near the end (kid me’s dreams to beat this would’ve been absolutely doomed, lmao). I’m still fond of all the sounds you make as you do things: the screams the enemies make when they die, the extremely bitcrushed voicelines as you get a game over or pick up a healing item, they all lend so much character. I think perhaps the boss battles felt rather basic (and a bit of a crapshoot as to whether you get hit upon entering the arena or not), and in general it’s… easier to softlock yourself in a bunch of levels than I feel it maybe should be, but as a whole this was a blast. Perhaps it’s not fully polished to the point where I could call it one of the best Nitrome games nowadays — moving the mouse to move the camera was… rather rough, the recording quality of the music wasn’t that great and there were a non-zero amount of points where shooting the chaingun didn’t feel like it maybe should — but if any game has done enough to earn the right of pet favourite, it’s this one. God knows how much past me loved this. And I reckon he would've been happy to know that I eventually got good enough to finally clear this, even if it, uh, took a good bit longer than he presumed it would.

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.

Right before I played this again, I was right ready to bask in my fond memories of playing and replaying the game to destroy as much of the level around me as possible. Having now refreshed myself… I think most of said memories are actually of Toxic II, but that’s not to say this isn’t fairly solid. It plays mostly like a 2D platformer, where your goal is to reach the exit portal, but the core mechanic is that by pressing the space bar you can drop a bomb at your feet, which will explode, after a time, destroying the walls and floor in a small radius around it, creating a way through otherwise unpassable barriers and fighting back against enemies. There are different types of bombs, which all have different side effects, but the game gives all of them to you immediately, robbing the player of things to learn and new mechanics to play with as they all go along. This mechanic also makes the game feel… rather slow: not only does the game give you way more time than you’re ever going to need for the bomb to detonate, it'll oftentimes take several bombs to actually get through an area, causing a rather tedious loop of walking to an area, laying a bomb, walking out of its radius, then repeating the process once the explosion happens and you’re sure the hitbox is no longer active.

On the other hand, though, there’s… surprisingly little rigidity in terms of how the player is allowed to approach the level. While there’s usually a given path to the end, you’re usually given the option to stray off that path however you like, provided the tools you require are in the level. You could take the path to the left, and deal with the clump of enemies that'll get in your way over there, or you could instead use your Throw Bomb on the ceiling above you, bypassing the tricky bit and reaching the end early. It’s freeform in how fast it lets the player do the level, rewarding both outside-the-box thinking and platformer know-how — an approach, I believe, is expounded and further iterated on in the followup released a year later. And while this game… certainly has the basics down, I have a feeling once I reach the sequel it’ll be clear how much this is mostly… a proof of concept. Not bad, on its own, but definitely a bit obsolete when put side to side with what it later would allow Nitrome to do.

So something I occasionally like to do is look over query pitches for literary agent submissions, both to prepare myself for the day I eventually yeet myself into the slush pile, but particularly because a lot of the minutiae fascinates me. There are a lot of little does and don’ts that can make the difference between getting a rejection or a full submission: a lot of it, in particular, coming down to whether you know your target market and aren’t just some wannabe who doesn’t understand the field. Nowhere is this more evident in the space where you put your comparative titles — the books your book is most like. Generally, you want to make them something in your genre of choice released during the past five years, and also something not as well known. Conversely, doing things like comparing your work to a big book, something released far outside the last couple of years, or even comparing your title to a big-budget film are huge no-nos: all they do is show that you’re not quite well-versed in the genre you’re writing in, and potentially indicate to the agent that you think your work is more groundbreaking than it is. A good first impression can sell a work all by itself, and one of the worst first impressions you can give is that you’re just a genre tourist. You want to know your market, you want to know how your work fits in that market, and you want to show the agent just how well you know all of that while still fitting within the general bounds and structure of a query. It’s a tough balancing act, and it’s loosely fascinating to see where people tend to trip up, and just how tricky it can be to get everything right.

Anyway sorry about that preamble, I know sometimes I tend to go overboard with them, it’s something I’m trying to work on, let’s just get on with talking about the game and-

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Twelve Minutes is a game where you play as a loving and devoted husband, who one day returns from work to have dinner with his equally loving and devoted wife. The evening goes off without a hitch, before a man claiming to be a police officer knocks on the door and demands you open up. Regardless of whether you let him in or he kicks the door down, he swiftly overpowers the both of you, demands of your wife to tell him where she hid ‘the pocket watch,’ then proceeds to shoot you in the head… sending you back to the beginning of the evening. It soon becomes clear that the husband is trapped in a time loop, and that not even staying alive can break you out. With no other options, you decide your only recourse is to find out why this is happening: using your foreknowledge of events to come to try and manipulate what occurs, all to find out why this cop is after the both of you, what the significance is of the pocket watch he’s asking for, and just what can happen within the space of twelve ten minutes.

I have to admit, it’s a fairly decent hook, and the first act of the game does a decent job of following it up. The apartment the game takes place in is small enough that everything you can interact with is well within reach, and it’s all a matter of experimentation: doing something, seeing the results, figuring out what you can glean from it, and how this information will help you resolve the overall mystery of the loop. I like the voice acting (even if the presence of Hollywood B-listers as opposed to professional voice actors makes me roll my eyes a little bit), and I’m also into how the game handles the consequences of your actions, and showing the disconnect between player and player character. Throughout the game, there’s a knife in the kitchen you are more than capable of using on your wife. Whether you do it for the funsies, or because you want to figure out what you learn by doing that, you stab your wife to death… all while the husband is freaking out, apologizing, and is absolutely horrified by doing this even beyond that loop. It immediately kind of brings in the reality of what you’re making your character do: taking something the player likely did out of curiosity and using it to make the atmosphere entirely, intentionally uncomfortable. As a whole, the game starts out well, with the premise immediately hooking you in and the initial stages providing a decent amount of options and things to do…

…only, as the game goes on, for you to find out that most of this game’s interactivity ends with what you already have. At the start of the game, the three things you can do in the apartment are to drug your wife’s drink with sleeping pills, hide in the closet so that the cop doesn’t know you’re there, and, if you do both together, you automatically indispose the cop when he tries to use a lightswitch. By the end of the game, these are still the only things you can do in the apartment. Most of what you actually do is navigate dialogue trees with your wife. And show your wife items to unlock more dialogue trees with her. And then do dialogue trees with your wife so you can then do dialogue trees with the cop. And this is all dialogue you’ve likely seen before and you are then going to see again all because maybe at the end of one diatribe there’ll be a new option you can pick, or that you didn’t pick before, which might mean something going forward. You might think ‘oh, can’t you just skip dialogue? that’s a feature that’s in basically every story-based game to sift through the tedium of seeing the same dialogue over and over again,’ but that’s not the case here. In Twelve Minutes you can skip through some dialogue… one line at a time, as if you’re going through a Dark Souls vendor’s dialogue to try and access their wares. And if you’re not actively in a cutscene with them — if you’re allowed to walk around the apartment while they have their dialogue — you can’t skip through it. You have to wait there, minute by minute, line by line, until you have the opportunity to step in and have something new happen. If you’re looking at your phone, or if you accidentally select the wrong option… whoops, loop ruined, go back to start, go through everything, manually, again.

Which, frankly, if the comp titles being intro-level Film Studies picks (which, like, no shade, I like two of those movies a lot, but also wow those are some basic bitch answers) wasn’t indication enough, the lack of polish and how… dated it feels, mechanically, really go to show how little it knows the genre it’s in. Even beyond the oodles of dialogue you oftentimes can’t skip through, the game’s so finicky and overcomplicated even when, on paper, it’s straightforward. At the beginning of the game, when I was meant to just mill around the house and have a romantic moment with my wife, I accidentally put my plate of food in my inventory when I tried to eat it, singlehandedly pissing my wife off enough to call the whole evening off. At one point, you’re directed to show the cop a picture on the fridge, but it’s not good enough to show the cop the picture on the fridge, you must engage him in dialogue trees that will tell him about the picture on the fridge, he’ll go and check it… only for the loop to be ruined because the picture on the fridge isn’t there. Because the picture of the fridge is currently in your inventory. Because you needed to show him the picture on the fridge so you then tried to show him the picture on the fridge. This then forces you to do the whole process again because, for a game partially about messing about in a time loop, and a genre/medium all about cause-and-effect and the consequences of your actions, this game is so rigid. There’s only one way you’re ever allowed to do things, and it’s usually the way where you find the item you need… then do nothing with it, instead just bringing it up in a dialogue tree down the line. For an adventure game, one that places a lot of emphasis on walking around and finding things in your apartment, it feels like the adventure gameplay runs contrary to what the game actually wants to be. Like it wants to be a visual novel but the dev is too busy looking up /r/movies ‘what’s your favourite psychological thriller?’ to realize that interactive media is more than just anime dating sims.

Because, like, if all the game wants me to do is go through the same dialogue trees over and over, then… why is this an adventure game? What’s the point of having to interface with your inventory and have to go through the whole twelve-step, two-minute process of drugging my wife over and over again at the start of near-every loop? What’s the point of being able to walk around my apartment during dialogue if I have to wait right where I am to do the next thing I need to do? It’d certainly be more streamlined if the game was only about navigating the dialogue trees it so wants me to navigate at the cost of anything else. And the game would certainly feel more playable if it had… any of the quality-of-life features that virtually every visual novel has by default. Why sit around, waiting for the game to run through dialogue it ran through before to maybe reach something new when I could just… skip to the next branching point, or the next bit of dialogue I haven’t already seen? When the last part of the game essentially boils down to “do this complicated and finicky setup to have a heart-to-heart with the cop, have an entire five minutes worth of conversation, then go back to step one, do the entire setup again, do the entire conversation again just to use something you learned during the first conversation to learn something new the next conversation just to go back and do that entire, unskippable process two more times…” why do that when you could just quicksave, or use a flowchart to go right to the point where things actually diverge? It’d certainly be much smoother to go through. And it’d definitely feel more of a match in terms of genre than the adventure game it currently is, where every convention it uses (inventory puzzles, the need for the game to be running in real-time) directly works against the experience and makes it feel much worse to play.

…I’m aware that this game’s ending is… rather disliked, and a big sticking point for most people I’ve seen talk about this game, but on my end… it was mostly just kind of whatever — its attempts to feel fucked-up and disturbing feel rather vanilla, honestly. And any chance for it to have an impact vanished when, instead of focusing on the immediate reactions of the characters, it just zooms into incomprehensible mind-palace shit and also you can fuck the whole segment up and you have to go out of your way to get back in and try again. Quite frankly, it feels like more of a smokescreen for what I felt were the game’s actual problems: how rigid, tedious, and finicky the game was on its way up to that point. There’s certainly initial promise — the setup works well as a narrative hook, and the initial stages are at least fun to experiment with until the game starts to show its warts — but when you can find ren;py VNs on itch.io and Steam with more polish and quality of life than this publisher-backed project… it becomes loosely clear this game thinks it’s more groundbreaking than it is. Comparative titles aren’t just buzzwords that your work might vaguely be like, they’re works you drew from, that were important in the process of constructing your own, and show to those with a more discerning eye that you’re not just a faker looking for prestige. And perhaps, if more time was spent researching the field rather than just throwing random psychological thrillers into your elevator pitch, this game could’ve been one of the many entries of the canon of time loop interactive narrative, rather than some brazen attempt at feeling like an innovation that it isn’t. 3/10.

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.

I never quite watched Are You Afraid of the Dark as a kid — my time and place had given me completely different childhood traumas — but even regardless of my lack of familiarity, I can still tell just how hard this manages to capture the vibes of one of those children's horror shows. It looks a bit cheap, and it's clearly meant to feel more fun than scary, then the other shoe drops and suddenly something genuinely evocative or tense gets thrown right in your face, like, say, the chase sequences. You'll collect an item, then suddenly something will come after you and the music will ramp up as you're forced to run: not quite knowing where you need to go, not quite sure how far your pursuer is behind you, or even if you're allowed to pause the game given how the music keeps playing only until you take out whatever's chasing you. For what's specifically an adventure game, and for... something a bit more evocative of its source material (or, say, the Goosebumps TV series), it's pretty impressive, both from a technical standpoint and from how the game manages to balance its horror elements.

I was also a pretty big fan of the framing device, and how it works to function... both as a part of the story and as a game mechanic. The events of the game are you, the player, attempting to continue a scary story started by somebody else, and at any point you can jump up a textual level and talk to the people around the fire with you, either playing through your past conversations for an indication of where to go next, or to get a direct hint upon a game over through the form of the rest of the people at the campfire discussing the story. There's hints of a fun little dynamic between the people at the campfire — something that might mean a bit more had I context of its source material — though I do wish perhaps the hints themselves were wrapped a bit more within the framing device. I understand that it... might be a bit confusing for hypothetical children playing this game otherwise, but if I'm telling a story, why are the other people at the campfire talking explicitly about game mechanics, or saying that *I* was the one who pressed the 'do not press' button? It's minor, but it did stick with me as something where the game could've committed a bit harder to... what's easily one of its strongest points in the framing device.

Besides that, I liked this! It's a nice, quick adventure game that works to avoid a lot of the more esoteric puzzle design of the time (aside from, say, some areas that are a bit too large and empty and where it's easy to get lost) which does a lot to evoke its genre of kid-friendly horror, and has a fairly unique and cool framing device to wrap the whole thing together. Definitely sad that this wasn't financially successful — I would've loved to see more like this. 7/10.

Finally, a piece of horror media that understands that the hitchhiker is in way more danger than anybody who chooses to help them out. Rather than a piece that chooses to fearmonger those most in need of help on the road based on what they could “”””””potentially”””””” do if you dare try and help them — an epitome of the capitalistic value of “fuck you got mine” — Fears to Fathom: Norwood Hitchhike hews closer to how the situation is like in the real world: you’re alone, at night, helpless, praying that whatever comes out of the darkness isn’t going to hurt you. You’re stranded, in the middle of nowhere, reliant on the kindness of strangers, hoping against hope that they have your best interests at heart. Even beyond how well it captures its subject matter, I also believe this is a really well-done indie game. The lo-fi, PS1-ish aesthetic, while maybe a bit dime-a-dozen in regards to indie horror, is utilized more… subtly, in a way that doesn’t call attention to itself. It’s an artstyle, rather than the be-all-end-all of the experience, and the framing device of the main character narrating what happened as an r/letsnotmeet style story really helps to add a unique level of character to the whole experience.

It’s also rather effective as a horror game — the way things start mundane and then slowly start to ramp up once you’re on the empty road, the way the game can bait-and-switch you into lowering your guard (and lead you into… honestly pretty effective jumpscares), a climax which was genuinely rather tense even after having already played the game once, and most of all how the sparse landscapes, the off-beat characters, and even the lighting really sell the vibe of being alone, outside, in the middle of the night. Both the bits where you are terrified for your life and just want to get home and the parts that… almost feel comfy: looking out a car window, listening to the hum of a stranger's car, seeing the outlines of the trees and the mountains and the wilderness inbetween, watching the road as it comes under the headlights. I wouldn’t call it perfect — there are moments gameplay-wise that felt finicky and a little broken, and there’s one particular narrative beat I’m a bit ??? on — but this game really does a lot for the 40 minutes you spend on it. It comes, it takes you for a ride, and then it drops you off on the side of the road. And while somebody else might pick you up later, and even despite the danger present throughout the experience, you're never going to forget what it was to be inside that stranger's car, and find yourself inside their world, even if only for a fleeting moment.

nitrome games if their marathon-length levels didn’t send you right back to the start when you died

Nanobots is a bullet-hell shoot ‘em up mostly reminiscent of Ikaruga in how, to damage enemies, you must change the colour of your little ship to match them. There are a couple core differences, though. First is that, rather than the traditional vertical screen, you’re allowed to freely roam a circular arena, kind of like what I understand of Geometry Wars. Second is that, rather than being able to change at will, you must traverse to certain parts of the arena to switch colour: for which the weapon you’re using will also change. It’s fun to move around the stage demolishing the scores of enemies that enter the arena, decently frenetic when you’re low on health and you need to survive long enough for the level to end/health packs to spawn in, and I love how your weapons upgrade and become capable of more as the game goes on, and how this is paired against the steadily increasing threat and numbers of enemies. On paper, it’s fun, but… God do levels being so overtly long kill it. Perhaps if there were checkpoints, or if the levels were split a bit more, or if there was a way to speed it up to get to the part where you died quicker, it’d be fine, but as is getting killed can be as easy as being on top of an enemy when it spawns, or hitting an obstacle that’s bugged and only has its hitbox show up, and can take you back as much as five minutes every time. It’s draiiinnning, and the fact that health packs disappear if you don’t pick them up turns what are otherwise fun levels into total endurance tests, enough so that I genuinely considered quitting even on the earliest levels. I’m glad I didn’t, because ultimately I do think I had fun in the end, but as far as Nitrome games I’d recommend… maybe not this one. At least not unless you've got some free time and patience on you. It can be rouuuuuuugh.

The third Dread X Collection, released… wow, two months after the second, keeps a lot of the same ideas in play. There are still twelve games in total, all following the same prompt, all wrapped together with an interactive launcher. This time, each game is tied together with a central theme of ‘SPOOPY’ — dancing the line between scary and cute, making things that appear innocent on the surface but become evidently not as you delve deeper and deeper — and, like, man this is so my shit. Weird genre mashups. Bizarre and evocative visual styles. Throwbacks to the most out-there of things, and gameplay conceits unlike many other horror games I’ve seen. And better yet, even though the theming itself is already pretty strong, and well-realized across each of the twelve games here, almost all of them are at the very least really solid in their own right. There’s one or two stinkers in the pack, but all the others are hits, between the fun and weird things they do with the prompt, their perpetual really strong aesthetics, and just how well they play, especially for games each made in ten or so days.

There’s one continual weak point, though: the launcher. Not the game itself — developed by KIRA of Spooky’s Jump Scare Mansion fame — which works fairly well as a wrap-around, solving puzzles in a castle to unlock more games to unlock more areas in the castle which unlock more puzzles which in turn unlock more games. More the… story content. How it screeches the game to a halt just so it can exposit to you for literal minutes. How if you just wanna go to a different game or somewhere else in the castle you’re forced to walk as slowly as possible in the meantime to listen to these two people babble on about whatever it even is they’re babbling on about. How you can mess the game up by walking past a dialogue trigger when you’re already in dialogue, causing it to not trigger and making you have to go all the way back just so you can trigger it and let the game continue. The way they handled the overarching story in Dread X 2 worked well: it was brief, it only popped up a couple of times the whole game, and if you didn’t care for it you could let it become background noise as you went to solve another puzzle/put another game into the VHS. Here they made it so much longer, so much less optional, and so much more boring: seriously, whatever it was they were talking about was really in-one-ear-then-out-the-other. Wasn’t necessarily something that tanked the collection as a whole for me, but man did I dread completing a game and going into the launcher for that exact reason.

Anyway, onto the individual games! In order from which I played them:

SATO WONDERLAND:
Fun! I love how everything comes together here: the retraux graphical style, the odd camera angles, the voicelines that sound cute but clash so hard with the vrrs and buzzes of the machines around you, this game sets up its vibes really well, and as a mood piece is consistently strong. It’s not let down by the writing, either: you’re set up with a breadcrumb trail at the start, and every part you uncover tantalizes you into wanting to know more… yet at the same time brings on even more questions, circling around and around before it all becomes clear at once. I… do think there was room for some more polish on the core mechanics, perhaps? Namely the part where you have to combine keywords: some sort of system where exhausting all the combinations for one particular word removes it from the list could help to ensure the player is continuously moving forward through things, in addition to preventing any situations (like what happened with me >_>) where the player forgets what specific things they’ve covered and start trying to brute force the game/repeating old combinations to try and find something that’ll let them progress. Other than that particular quibble (and some, uh, bugginess near the end) this was solid! Doubt it’ll end up my favourite of the pack but certainly an encouraging enough start.

BUBBO: ADVENTURE AT GERALD’S ISLAND:
So this game takes the style of, say, a Banjo-Kazooie, a Mario 64, like one of those N64 early-3D platformers where you run and jump around a singular large level, doing quests and searching for hidden nooks and crannies to get all the Jiggies and get all the coins. What I think I like most about this is how hard it commits to the aesthetic: characters grunt noises as their dialogue unfurls across the screen, the character models are simplistic but not obviously blocky, and even as the ~spooky~ things start it does so in a way that never truly undercuts the idea of this theoretically being an N64 platformer. Or at least, never really does anything that Mario 64 or Banjo Kazooie wouldn’t, tonally. It’s also fairly fun as a platformer. The platforms are simple, floaty enough that you can get away with some jumps you maybe shouldn’t, yet some of the coins/objectives you need to do require enough engagement with the mechanics that you can’t just waltz through the game (let alone all the stuff you need to do for the secret ending). I think perhaps the final challenge is kind of annoying? It’s a fun idea to have to run across the entire island in one mad dash, and there are a lot of cool shortcuts you can take if you’re confident enough to try, but it’s so rough having to go back to the start every time your chaser nothin’ personnels right in front of you when you’re in the middle of a jump. Bittttt of a lowlight on what’s otherwise a pretty fun game. Would otherwise rec, though!

SPOOKWARE @ THE VIDEO STORE:
A horror… microgames collection? I’ve… never actually played any WarioWare, or anything else of that ilk (other than the Smash stages) but when I found out there was a game pack in my game pack I was rather amused, to say the least. And I stayed that way going through it! It almost feels… roguelite/endurance run in nature: to clear a level, you have to complete ten randomly chosen microgames in succession. If you clear one, you get to continue, but fail three times, you’ve got to go right back to the start. It becomes a macro game, both of desperately trying to figure out the rules of the game while you still have time to clear it, and then also hoping you’ll roll the levels you're good at and also come to understand the games that are a bit more ??? to you. There’s nothing more stressful than trying to figure out how a rotary phone works under a time limit. It’s great. Not to mention how cool the individual games are: how divergent they feel from each other, the layered-photorealistic-patchwork aesthetics going on, and all the little jokes when you pass or fail a game, this was super fun. Enough so for me to actually try the endless mode for a good bit once I was technically done with the game. Good stuff. Found out there was actually a full release for this one and honestly… I’m a bit surprised, but I’m happy. Always glad to see which out of all of these games manages to go the extra mile.

SOUL WASTE:
…Another N64-styled get-all-the-coins platformer. Huh. At the very least, it’s considerably different than the one before. You’re barely given any instruction beyond the premise, no real direction the game points you to, you’re merely just left to explore the wastes, searching for the things you need to find while fighting enemies and collecting all the things you can. It’s a vibe, honestly. The game achieves that Goldilocks-esque middle ground between requiring your attention if you don’t wanna die yet also letting you zone out and listen to your friends talk about whatever it is they’re talking about. Patricia Taxxon did the music and it works well: synth-heavy tracks that run the gamut from sparse to simplistic to suddenly loud and complex and frenetic. It’s great. Maybe wish the physics didn’t feel as icy? Maybe also wish some of the enemy encounters didn’t flood you as hard as they do? Made some sections feel a little rough playing through, but otherwise… yeah, I enjoyed this a good deal. Honestly if there were a solo release of this I’d one hundo percent play it again. This was a fun time.

NICE SCREAMS AT FUNFAIR:
Well, they can’t all be winners. I guess sometimes when you only have a few days to make an entire videogame you sometimes won’t be able to make the deadline. Nice Screams at Funfair is, theoretically, a game that involves you scooping ice cream for customers at an undead amusement park. The reality is that it’s a rather buggy mess. Customers think about the ice cream they want for a split second before standing there, listlessly, endless patience in their eyes as they watch you fumble with the tray doors as you desperately try to keep their order in your memory. Putting scoops on the cone requires you to throw your scooper, for some reason, and my booth quickly became littered with pitches that missed or bounced off the cone, almost all the challenge having to navigate the rather fiddly physics. There’s a system where you can try to avoid the gaze of the security drone in the booth to attempt to sneak in tips but also it’s bugged and even if you do it when it’s not looking it’ll catch you out anyway. I tried this once and then a customer came in and gave their order while I wasn’t looking so I was forced to restart the whole game. There’s no real rush to complete orders in time — no mounting pressure of, say, more customers coming in as you try to complete the order currently on hand — so even if the game worked as it was meant to there… really isn’t much depth here. You do like five orders and then the game ends. Perhaps, if this had more time in the oven, there… could be a little bit of something here, but as is it mostly feels like the side of game jams nobody tells you about. Sometimes you make something that’s honestly incredible given the constraints in place. Sometimes those same constraints force you into putting out a rushjob.

CHIP'S TIPS:
I’m sorry, I can’t not love this. It might not necessarily have as much as some of the other games in this pack do but it makes up for it in sheer charm, and just how hard it kinda goes for it. A Blue’s Clues style horror game is a silly idea in theory, and frankly just as silly in practice, but the game does a fantastic job at making you laugh with it, from its rather irreverent sense of humour, its animation, the way the FMV interacts with the pre-rendered backgrounds, it certainly leans towards humour harder than any of the other Torple Dook games I’ve played, but it does it so well. And not to say the game isn’t without its substance: it’s a fairly solid puzzle game as you explore and unlock new parts of the house to tick off all the items on your checklist, and honestly? as a horror game? it actually got pretty unnerving, to the point where I was loosely dreading what was going to happen as things started going more and more off the rails. I… don’t think I can particularly say more about this. It’s very much one of those games that appeals specifically to me. It’s also very much one of those things that you’re gonna have to see for yourself.

SUBMISSION:
(spoilers for this one. this game buries the lede on what it is for a non-zero period of time but tragically to talk about requires one to loosely ruin the surprise. if you were at all interested in playing this one skip this review I guess)

Having played and liked The Open House, a previous game by the same developer, I was eager to see whether this game would be just as fun and inventive, and it didn’t disappoint! Beyond the intro — which is fairly on point for what it’s trying to parody — the core of the game is you, the player, going through the same perils most game devs go through having only a few days to make an entire video game. Find the store-bought assets that don’t clash with your vision! Physically fight the code of the game to get basic mechanics to work! Solve the mystery lying at the heart of all these disparate indie horror stock locations! On sheer conceptual level it’s very, very strong. In practice… it’s a rather solid puzzler, with a decent core of mixing and matching areas and mechanics to open new spaces up and eventually complete your very own video game. It’s fun, clever, and at one point honestly a bit unnerving, though it admittedly did get rather tedious manually creating the mechanics over and over again every time I had to switch from one to the other, especially when I was stuck and a bit confused on what I’m meant to be doing next. Also awkward when you manage to break through and progress with one mechanic… only to then have to go back out and switch it out for another mechanic. Kinda wish there was a way it could’ve been streamlined because it felt rather clunky as was. Not enough to ruin the game — the concept alone super carries this, let alone just how well the game’s style of parody characterizes the whole thing — though perhaps enough to knock it below the upper echelons of this pack.

MATTER (OVER) MIND:
The… third collect-the-notes style platformer, though I wouldn’t necessarily call this retro-styled — the top-down camera, I think, pushes it out of that realm and more into letting it feel like its own thing. On the other hand, I think the top-down style also makes this game feel a lot clunkier than I think was intended. You play a goopy thing that jumps onto people’s heads to take them over, but there’s no way to really be able to judge your height as you jump, which often led me to sail past people’s heads or accidentally hit a platform I’m trying to jump onto. And even if it weren’t for the camera, your jump feels so clumsy: you have to hold down the jump for a little bit to be able to get any height at all which is great when you need to climb up a staircase while one the guards are firing 18 times into your head and chest region. The stealth… felt rather borked too, guards detecting me through line of sight blockers, remaining procced on me even when I’ve left the room, in general not feeling like it works the way it should. There’s a secret ending you can collect if you get all the coins, but dying resets the counter back to zero, meaning that should you mess up a platforming section or should the platforming stop you from getting away from a guard you have to scour the entire facility all over again. There’s certainly a good concept here: I love the “organism wrecks shit in the lab he was born in in an attempt to get free” genre of horror, and I did like the general sense of humour, but I think if any game here suffered from the game-jam time limit it was this one. Polish wise it only feels like it's only partway there.

REACTOR:
Neat little walking sim. Perhaps doesn’t truly go anywhere out there — you can kinda guess the way the story’s gonna go once it gets in motion — but it’s competently told, and even then a lot of what this game is going for is stylistic. The endless desert landscape outside your little station. The stark, blinding black and white all around you, only broken up by the pink of your AI assistant and the red of the meteor. The way walking across the ground feels: the smooth floors and staircases of the station compared to the grooves and bumps of everything else, there’s a lot that characterizes the experience even if the main story doesn’t quite feel so unique. The game was also rather buggy? Driving the car through the desert felt like I was fighting against the game a little bit, and by the end I managed to get myself stuck in such a way that I couldn’t move and had to start the game over again. Maybe gave me a bit more time to notice stuff I didn’t before, but, uh, perhaps something that would’ve been nice to avoid. Sticks out a little for the worse amongst the rest of the pack given how standard this feels compared to the… varied ways the rest of the anthology goes out there, but I’d still say it’s solid.

DISPARITY OF THE DEAD:
My favourite of the… wow there were four separate N64-era collect-the-notes platformers this pack, weren’t there? Not especially a genre I look at and naturally think ‘horror’, but this game in particular I think works in how it leans into it. The afterlife is desolate — disparate platforms dotting an endless void, the denizens left with nothing but to contemplate their life and death for eternity. Plays… a bit odd with the whole “you are a detective finding CLUES and figuring out a MYSTERY” element, thinking about it, but even then I think the writing is one of the strongest parts of this. Death and suicide are fairly common topics of conversation as you jump across the wasteland; specifically, what happens after somebody makes that choice to end their life, and how one ultimately copes with the reality of eternity. At the very top of the world is a payphone that delivers a constant stream of last words, and what struck me most was... forgive me, the disparity between how those about to die approach the end: how much consent they have in the choice, how at peace they are with what’s about to happen. It all builds up to you crossing over and visiting the land of the living, and while aesthetically it’s rather striking… it perhaps plays less well than the 3D platforming you’ve done before. The game suddenly takes on fixed-camera tank controls… and it does not control well: your perspective frequently changes and so do the controls, to the point where I honestly never knew what direction I was going to move when I tried to move. It’s at least a fairly minor part of the whole experience, and doesn’t take away too much from… just how strong this is in general. At least thematically, at least for most of the game's runtime. Honestly, the fact that it’s not first place really just speaks to the strength of this pack. There's some real heavy hitters here.

BETE GRISE:
This one is carried at least a little bit on its aesthetics but man do its aesthetics carry it far. The pixel art is just gorgeous: the bright yet off-colour… colours present everywhere you go, all the little things you can find in the background, and the way Pom always looks ever so off model whenever she’s on screen, there’s so much effort to making this all look a little off and yet at the same time just so visually striking. It made me so happy to see new things for the sake of seeing these new things. Also loved the grid movement, how reminiscent it is of, like, the flash games they used to have on the Cartoon Network website, how it always feels like you’re going to open up the elevator to something you don’t particularly want to see. Do wish there were more minigames to do as you go through the hotel — especially given that the most tedious of the three is the one you do the most — but honestly that complaint feels a bit pocket change: even if it is a bit sparse in terms of content it more than manages to make up just for how well it does atmospherically. Really wanna see what else this dev has done. Perhaps not the most memorable on paper, but not something I’m going to forget any time soon.

EDEN: GARDEN OF THE FAULTLESS:
Have you ever wanted to play the Chao Garden from Sonic Adventure 2 but instead of raising Chao you’re raising biblically accurate angels? Well, be not afraid, EDEN: Garden of the Faultless might just be the game for you. The gameplay loop is simple: you get gifted a biblically accurate angel from above, you ram them into trees to collect fruit, and then you send them off to the races. Winning a race makes all the angels you have obsolete due to stat caps, but that’s fine, all you have to do is get God to give you a new angels, then command all your previous angels to kill themselves at the altar so that your new pet can be even stronger! It’s simple… if rather finicky. Getting your angels to go where you want them to is this whole process where you gotta click on the angel you want, go to the place you want them to go, then watch them slowly move over from where they randomly drifted off. Not to mention how buggy the game is: angels randomly switching names, angels ramming into you and throwing you into the bottomless pit below you, angels randomly despawning and making you think they’ve just disappeared forever… even despite this, though, there’s a fun, if maybe a slightly tedious core. I like that the game… doesn’t actually go full horror with its concept. It’s morbid, sure, but it always makes sure to be a little cute about it, never suggesting a particular tone around anything you’re doing, which then makes the point where it tries to sneak something past you feel much more potent. Perhaps not a favourite — having to grind up an angel’s stats became a bit tedious after a bit — but it was cute, a fun way to spend an hour or so.

Chip's Tips > SPOOKWARE @ The Video Store > Bete Grise > Disparity of the Dead > Soul Waste > Submission > Bubbo: Adventure on Geralds Island > Sato Wonderland > EDEN: Garden of the Faultless > Reactor > Matter OVER Mind > Nice Screams at Funfair

From a game I remember fondly to… a game I don’t remember at all. The next stretch of games here are almost back-to-back-to-back in terms of how often I returned to them, how representative they were of my memories frequenting Nitrome.com, and then there’s also Magneboy, which… I probably played, but certainly not enough to leave any sort of impression, especially compared to what’s around it. Not to say it doesn’t compare to them, though! This is more of a straight puzzle game compared to anything else (so far) in Nitrome’s oeuvre, but it’s neat to see just how well their tendencies translate from one genre to another. Your goal for each level is to use your power of magnetism to get from the start square to the end square, but the number of things you interact with to fulfil that end varies level by level. From tiles that you pull towards you, from tiles that you pull towards them, to tiles that create bridges across the level, to portals that you can enter and/or send blocks through, there’s a real ebb and flow to the way the game handles all its disparate mechanics. I especially like how the first level to introduce a mechanic will usually take it easy on you… then immediately throw something much harder, giving you the basics of the mechanic before asking you how that mechanic fits in with everything else in the game. It’s decently cerebral, manages to avoid the typical puzzle game trap of becoming too complicated for its own good, and that feeling when you finally realize what you’re meant to do and complete the last couple of steps in quick succession is unparalleled. It’s probably the first 50-level Nitrome game where that length… almost feels justified. I’m… a bit unsure whether this game really needed enemies/a health bar — they were often just kind of an annoyance at best and felt rather superfluous to the systems already there — but aside from that this is a solid way to spend an hour. I can’t quite remember how many more puzzle games Nitrome did after this — I don’t think they really started popping up until the year after this — but for a first-ish foray this isn’t half bad. Can’t wait to see more.

Iron Lung is a game where you pilot a submarine through an ocean of blood on an alien moon, instructed to traverse the seafloor and take pictures of landmarks. As you cannot see outside the ship, barring taking photos, most of what you do is push buttons on the submarine controls, watch the coordinates go up and down, cross-check them with the map to approximate where you are, and it’s… surprisingly super engaging? Even before the horror elements set in, there’s a lot of fun in plotting where you’re going to go, figuring out how to get there, and dealing with all the obstacles along the way — every time I had to navigate my way through a tunnel felt genuinely tense, but when I managed to make it through to the other side I felt… honestly pretty excited for having been able to do that. The game also does a fairly excellent job at slow-building for something that’s only 90 minutes long, and the retro aesthetic, rustic colours, and the… unique premise create an atmosphere that carries and characterizes the whole experience. All in all… yeah, I’d say this is pretty great. Easily the winner of all the games I played on Halloween. 8/10.

I liked the first two Simulacra games! They’re… certainly not perfect — in fact, I’d go as far to say they’re quite flawed, in places — but they really do exactly what they set out to. They’re concise, fun little FMV games that take the concept of “go into a missing person’s phone to solve their disappearance” to some fun places, and at the end of the day always link back to their core concept in a way that… really makes it feel like it’s not just a gimmick, that being on a phone is a core part of the experience, and that to change it to something else would result in something else entirely. Sure, the voice acting is… rather inconsistent, and the writing has a tendency to make the cast a lot less likable than intended, but even discounting how… I’d probably give it a pass anyway given that these games are from a Malaysian studio, sometimes that sort of thing can unintentionally work in a game’s favour: sometimes having your asshole ex-boyfriend character be a total dick really manages to sell him as somebody who’s totally at fault in the situation. Sometimes one of the major parts of your narrative (and the road to avoiding the worst ending) involves placating and not alienating a guy who's… oftentimes totally cringe and easy to make fun of. Sometimes you’re talking about the inauthenticity of influencer culture, and having your influencer characters come off as unsympathetic and coarse to be around really helps to sell that message. It’s… definitely a fine line to tell whether it’s intentional or unintentional on the game’s part, but regardless, there’s virtue in being able to turn your weaknesses into a strength, and I think Simulacra and its direct sequel really do a good job at patching up those holes.

So when I found out that a new game in the series had released, I was pretty down to see how the series continued. I found it… odd, that it’d been released as quietly as it had — and for games I discovered through YouTube playthroughs it was definitely weird to see nobody I follow pick up and play this game at all — but I eventually got around to it and found, ultimately… something I don’t feel quite managed to work around its flaws quite as well as the first two games did. And, sad to say, I think I found something that didn’t quite have as strong a core concept as the first two. Or, in fact, that clear of a core concept at all.

You play as an intern at the local paper, tasked with helping out the lead journalist, Ruby Myers, as she investigates a series of disappearances around the town of Stonecreek. One day, the phone of Paul Castillo — the latest missing person — is mysteriously sent to Ruby, and she bequeaths it to you: both to search for any potential clues inside, and to help her as she does most of the legwork. Upon delving into Paul’s phone, it soon becomes clear that these disappearances are something supernatural in nature, and that Paul has rigged up his phone to serve as a breadcrumb trail, where by finding clues more parts of his phone and history are unlocked, leading the player to dig into the history of Stonecreek, interact with Paul’s former contacts, and hope that the end of the trail leads to a solution to the problem: a way to eliminate the supernatural threat before it takes any more victims.

As a base premise, it works, and as a game, the pieces are all there. It’s satisfying to be able to dig deep into somebody’s history and slowly piece together everything, and I like how the reward for finding clues or making progress is oftentimes being able to access more parts of the phone. It provides an interesting method of story progression beyond how the plot moves forward: for every step you take you’re made more privy to background info, which then feeds into you figuring out what to do next. There were some fairly neat puzzles — and one particular section involving accessing Paul’s home security which felt fairly standout, even if in practice I… felt it could’ve stood to be a bit more involved, or a bit more difficult. Most of all, I really do enjoy how much work was put into making Stonecreek feel like a real, lived-in community: from the chatter of incidental townspeople on the town social media app, the focus on local urban legends and ghost stories, the way your direct contacts talk about the place, there’s a real focus on painting this picture of a small town undergoing gentrification, and I think it pays off.

What maybe doesn’t work as well is the story itself: particularly, the people you directly interact with as you try and solve the mystery. This is what I was referring to during my preamble. The story hinges considerably on the player liking the cast of contacts in Paul’s phone, but the writing’s never quite there. Ruby’s potentially the biggest victim of this: you’re meant to be her sidekick, and a lot of the heft for the late stages of the game hinges on you having formed a connection with her, but there wasn’t really a lot of spunk or voice in the words she was saying to me: it felt like she was nagging me around for most of the game, and a lot of her conflict regarding the ethics of journalism/her place in Stonecreek felt more like things the game was trying to establish were her Traits rather than natural topics that popped up during gameplay. Paul, as the person you’re hoping you can maybe find, felt characterized through what we rummaged through, but for someone you mainly see through FMVs the acting was… not there (and, as a sidenote, there were wayyyy too many videos where Paul just parses over his notes or his corkboard where absolutely nothing happens), and I really felt as I was going through Paul’s history that I was doing so for the overall mystery rather than anything for Paul himself. The other characters felt… mostly there, more than anything. They’re defined and likable enough, but they lack story presence — you talk to them for one section of the game and then you don’t talk to them again and then you suddenly actually do have to talk to them again and it felt… abrupt, and a rather weak attempt at bringing it all together.

I also felt like a lot of the overall framing and concept was rather loose in how it came together, to the point where I felt the game never really took full advantage of the ‘found phone’ aspect of it. Specifically, while I was interested in the theming regarding small town gentrification, and the conflict of interests between the town council and the townspeople, this never quite really interfaces with the mechanics, or what you access on the phone: while internet comments and news articles talk about it, at best it’s mostly set dressing more than any sort of proper synthesis, and at worst it’s characters expositing that This Is The Main Theme of The Game. While previous games often had you access apps heavily based off real life ones (such as Twitter, Tinder, Instagram) which even beyond providing a sense of verisimilitude, also added a sense of diversity in what you did — sometimes you’d do a puzzle in one app, then you’d have to move to a different app, then you’d have to text someone, etc. Here, the only app other than texts/emails/the general internet is… this weird combination of Facebook/Twitter centered around local Stonecreek businesses that Paul has apparently jury rigged to hide (presumably) public pages from whoever accesses his phone unless they solve his riddles three?

That’s another area where I wasn’t really as into things: a lot of the game mechanics regarding uncovering more parts of the phone felt rather artificial. Rather than digging into a missing person’s phone to try and find them (with tech issues/more supernatural causes preventing you from seeing everything on the phone), you’re on Paul’s ride from the start: he has this grand keikaku he’s trying to guide you through and he apparently foresaw everything you were going to do before the phone ever touched your hands. One that he already has most of the pieces for but also doesn't enact because I guess there wouldn't have been a game otherwise. It never feels like the player is figuring anything out for themselves, nor does it feel like they have any agency, you're just doing what Paul already did for you, with nothing actually getting in the way of his grand plan up until the climax. Roadblocks aren’t “you don’t have the information you need to proceed,” it’s “Paul won’t let you proceed until you know exactly what he wants you to know.” It’s… a unique direction to take, sure, but it felt rather convoluted, and it strained credibility that this guy was able to foresee everything to this extent and also encrypt his… phone, of all things, into some weird horror game puzzle box. It didn’t feel natural. And a lot of the phone stuff in general… didn’t really feel like it really came together.

I also just feel like this game was a bit undercooked. My impression is that COVID played a part in this — actors having to film scenes in isolation, not being able to use exterior sets — but you can see it in other spots as well. There are a lot less FMVs this time around, and other than… I think two, they’re all connected to Paul and Ruby, which comes at the expense of most of the side characters: robbing the player of the chance to see that non-online dimension to them, or for some particular characters not even getting the chance to know what they even look like. The FMVs themselves… are also a bit rough. While there’s some fairly decent CGI across the board, a good portion suffer from having fairly obvious green screens — the climax, in particular, looks like it’s taking place in Minecraft, and even disregarding some of the plot frustrations I had with it it definitely cheapened the effect it was intended to give. I also feel the story suffers from not having a direct confrontation with the villain — and, in particular, from the villain not feeling very well defined at all. I feel like maybe this would’ve helped with my issues regarding themes linking into gameplay: a proper interaction where we understand what the villain, what they represent and their goals I feel could’ve done a lot to bring it all together (and the scenes in Simulacras 1 and 2 where you come face to face with the malevolent entity are fairly easily two of the best scenes in each game), but instead… honestly I’m not sure who the bad guy even was, in the end? They had the same name as the baddie in 1 but given that its MO was totally different it’s probably actually something else? It felt so indistinct. I felt like… a lot of this needed an edit pass. Or maybe a bit more time in the oven.

And in the end… I dunno. I don’t really like judging the worth of something based on its status as a sequel, an adaptation, etc., but I feel like, in comparison, this game is the worst in the trilogy. While there’s a sense of satisfaction in solving puzzles and unfolding the mystery, and while I can see the effort in building the setting and making it feel lived in, the rough character writing and the lack of cohesion between gameplay and theming makes this particular entry feel not quite up to snuff with the rest. 5/10.

The Dread X Collection is… a hybrid anthology/game jam which asked one thing of ten different indie horror devs: distill the horror game of their dreams into a short playable teaser. To that end, the prompt was executed in a variety of ways: some of the games in the pack beg the question of how they could even be extended further, given how complete they feel as standalone experiences, while others… definitely feel more like a proof of concept than something that stands on its own. It’s a smorgasbord of different ideas and executions, the quality varying wildly between each game in the pack, which… as someone who loves horror, and new ideas, and analyzing what works and what doesn’t, this is my shit.

So here are my thoughts on each game, organized by the order in which I played them. There’s a little ranking at the end in case you’re interested, but without any further ado:

THE PAY IS NICE:
I like some of the stuff going on here — I’m into the theming around what we’ll excuse or stomach if it’s part of our job, and I love the diegetic representation of the fixed camera angles as security cameras automating your every move — but the writing is… not quite there, and sadly there’s a glitch where there’s no animation for walking backwards so I ended up just zooming everywhere through the facility which kind of undercut a lot of what the game was trying to build up. I could definitely see this working a bit more if it was longer (diegetically represent the daily grind by making you do the same thing over and over again, maybe), but as is… it’s a bit hamfisted and abrupt to really work, IMO.

DON’T GO OUT:
This honestly has a ton of potential as a (theoretically) full game. I love the idea of a horror/slasher-themed deckbuilder/roguelike/RPG thing, and I’m into a lot of the mechanics here — how you need slowly-fading torchlight to see through the fog of war, how the arena becomes smaller with each turn, the focus on using the cards you get to just try and survive rather than clear an objective or win… I’d be super down for this to be expanded on. Right now though… there isn’t particularly much here — it’s precisely one level, where the only difference between easy victory and near unavoidable defeat is… whether the player is able to find a specific door while in complete darkness, which… doesn’t provide a particularly engaging experience. I absolutely see the potential in this and really hope this gets made into something full, but the playable teaser in itself does… not have a lot to it.

HAND OF DOOM:
This was pretty cool. This is a throwback to some of the old early dungeon crawler games (honestly reminiscent of Virtual Hydlide, at least in terms of how it looks), complete with a menu that takes up two-thirds of the screen and a… rather fun magic system where you have to press buttons to physically chant out each spell. Getting new spells — and using them to progress forward — is one of the coolest things about this game, and even if it is a bit simplistic and more of a demo/proof-of-concept than a game of its own I still had a ton of fun with it. Super happy that this one in particular got expanded into a full experience. The 20-30 minutes of it I played really delivered in selling me on the concept.

SUMMER NIGHT:
Frankly, I’m… not particularly sure how this could even be seen as the start of something larger, given how complete of an experience it feels on its own. The game does build up fairly well, starting off as a really accurate game-and-watch throwback which is fairly fun in its own right, and as the game progresses, so too do things stop being quite what they seem, in a way that interfaces rather well with how the game adds new mechanics to up the ante. I’d knock it down a bit mostly due to how there are… so many periods where you’re just waiting for the game to continue — I guess it’s meant to make the player more unsettled, but it felt more like dead air than anything — but aside from that this was a super solid standalone experience. Easily the highlight of the pack.

OUTSIDERS:
This one… I might have been a bit too fatigued to really appreciate it while I was playing it. It’s… almost like a survival horror roguelike, in a way. You have to scour an empty, unfamiliar house to find items (primarily keys) that let you solve puzzles, which all coalesce to perhaps let you out… except, secretly, there’s a time limit, and when your stumbling around the house not quite knowing what to do leads you to run out of time, you’re forced to start over again… but with all the items in different spots. I won’t reveal anything after this point, but… as a whole it’s a really interesting take to make a time-attack survival horror, and I like the way the mechanics are justified thematically. I doooo however think that maybe the puzzling itself is a little weak: it’s mostly just “find item unlock way with item” puzzles, where most of the ultimate challenge ending up being having to find the keys you need in the hundreds of drawers within the house, something not helped by how the time limit slowly makes it impossible to actually see anything as all the lights around you get snuffed out. Still, I’m definitely intrigued by the main idea here, and definitely would be interested in seeing it expanded on, even if I maybe wasn’t the biggest fan of this particular demo. Also I SAW THOSE HQ_RESIDENTIAL_HOUSE ASSETS, YOU CAN’T HIDE FROM ME.

MR. BUCKET TOLD ME TO:
This one is a survival sim — one of the ones where you have to scavenge to keep your food and water and piss and shit meters up to keep yourself alive — and while it’s a bit simplistic by virtue of being a game jam game the core mechanic where each day you have to choose which of your tools to give up forever adds an interesting edge to it. I say ‘interesting’ because in practise it’s kind of like Don’t Go Out where you kind of have to know the specific answer or else you’re doomed to fail, but as a preview for a potential something larger I’m into what it’s going for: taking the way resource management works in these sorts of survival sims, and then through forcing you to get rid of your tools and scour the island for far less useful ways of feeding/hydrating/cleaning yourself slowly make it clear that this is more survival horror. Definitely think that if this goes in a little deeper on its mechanics and also gives the player a bit more of a setup/indication of how things work (I played this game twice in total and had no idea some things were in there until near the end of my second) I could definitely vibe with this as a full experience.

ROTGUT:
oh boy I do love walking down an empty tunnel for 15 minutes while absolutely nothing happens- wait what do you mean I have to walk the exact same distance back to the start- wait what do you mean the game glitched out and didn’t give me any ending- wait what do you mean my chair just fell apart irl and I have to get a new one before class starts-

THE PONY FACTORY:
This was a fun little boomer shooter. The short of the game is that you’re travelling through this abandoned factory for something that lies at the center of it, fighting creatures called “ponies” along the way, and… for the most part it works in how simple it is. I like the fact that you can’t carry your gun and your flashlight at the same time, forcing you into a situation where either you can see enemies but can’t fight back or you can fight back but can’t see them. I’m also into the level design — how conductive it is to surprise encounters, and how it changes up once you collect the something and you start going through the levels backwards to get out. I think the difficulty is tuned up a bit high — and I’m pretty sure switching down to an easier mode did nothing — but aside from that it was a neat way to spend ~30 minutes. Dunno how this would expand into a more “full” experience but I’d be down to see it.

SHATTER:
I love the vibes in this one, both in how it wears the PSX throwback graphical style (I love this one’s use of colours in particular, I feel like you never get to see lush greens and pinks in a game like this) and how much it evokes the post-apocalyptic cyberpunk dystopia it’s trying to be. In terms of being a teaser, it feels more like one to set up a world rather than to set up a game, and to that end it worked — I liked walking around and seeing and learning about where exactly I was. I… wasn’t particularly a fan of how restrictive and annoying the stamina bar is — for something that’s ostensibly a walking simulator most of the runtime, forcing you to walk super slow unless you get a secret upgrade just made going around everywhere much more of a chore than it had to be — but… yeah, I’m sold. Really wanna see what a bigger version of this is like.

CARTHANC:
This one’s sad because for as much production value is here and for how good the vibe is this felt more annoying to play than anything. I love the artstyle of, like, this alien temple that takes the aesthetic of ancient Egypt but adds a futuristic spin on it but the core of this is like, a first-person platformer — and not one that plays particularly well. The use of first-person makes your perspective rather limited in a way that makes platforming frustrating, since it’s hard to really gauge how good your jump is or where you are on a platform — I failed so many times because I’d accidentally walked off a platform before I jumped or because I was standing on something dangerous and didn’t know it. Combined with enemies who… basically scream in your ears constantly while they spawncamp you, and a lack of an idea on what the player is supposed to do at any point and… yeah. Like the idea, like how it looks, but god did this one feel so frustrating to play.

Summer Night > Hand of Doom > Shatter > The Pony Factory > Mr. Bucket Told Me To > Outsiders > Don’t Go Out > Carthanc > The Pay Is Nice > Rotgut

Having loved the playable teaser of this in the first Dread X Collection, and having then immediately learned that this managed to get a full release, I was super excited to play this during the months it took for me to get around to it. And it didn’t disappoint! Virtually all the strengths in the 20-30 minute demo translate perfectly to the full release, and the game… almost manages to weather the longer playtime without feeling long in the tooth. The game captures the appearance of a 90s FMV game perfectly, meshing real actors in with pixelated graphics not unlike, say, Harvester or Phantasmagoria, and combat where you must swing your weapon in real-time, like… the first thing I think of is Virtual Hydlide but thankfully everything feels so much smoother here: possessing some fun quirks of movement befitting the time it’s emulating, such as having to use your keyboard to look up and down, while never falling into direct clunkiness. I love the spell system: how you have to click through menus to physically chant each spell, how each spell opens new paths both in front of you and littered throughout previous parts of the game almost like a Metroidvania, and how with brute force and some experimentation you can come across spells before the game officially teaches them to you. The game’s brand of comedy works to keep the line teetering between parody/reference and yet still being able to take itself seriously, and never feels like it gets old even as the game goes on. A big strength of this developer — having gone through all his Dread X offerings — is his ability to just create a vibe that's so unserious yet so unique in how they feel, and this game has that in spades.

There are a couple of things I wish were different, though: I think the final area pushes the game into “too long” territory, and the second area in particular I think is wayyyyyyyyy too large for its own good — too much space between landmarks means there’s a lottttttt of time spent walking around, especially when you’re backtracking/looking for specific things on the map. I also wish the “walk faster” spell was given to you earlier/didn’t cost health to perform: by the time I was capable of using it it was past the point where it would’ve been most appreciated, and it’s not particularly useful for the thin walkways/compressed rooms that the game throws at you after. Also wish spells were more useful in combat: they’re usable, but never quite viable, and it always felt like I could do more just swinging my sword as opposed to standing still and watching my character chant out a spell while the enemy is free to slice me up. Aside from those quibbles, though, I think this did a good job at expanding on yet still capturing what made the Dread X Hand of Doom work so well: it’s a rather engaging puzzle game with a fun, irreverent set dressing, weaponizing its influences in such a way that it looks and plays unlike anything else I’ve really seen. If there’s perhaps an edit pass that works a bit on the pacing, maybe adds some stuff, maybe gives you a couple of things earlier than it does (as well as fixing the bugs that… a lot of people who aren’t me seemed to get) I think there really can be something special here. 8/10.

I don’t like pointing out quote-unquote ‘plot holes.’ It’s a pedantic, lazy way of judging a work and often feels like it’s missing the forest for the trees — not questioning, say, broader issues with the structure or writing or something to instead point and go “but why didn’t they do [thing I, a rational mind, would instead do in this situation]. this is a problem with the work. ding!” What it ignores, in particular, is that literally everything has these inconsistencies or little mistakes if you squint hard enough — and that it’s up to the work as a whole to… work as a whole, in a way that patches these small issues over and makes any inconsistencies not seem as glaring. Some of my favourite books, films, games, etc. usually do have problems… but they’re either minor, or I enjoy the work to such an extent that I don’t feel guilty ignoring whatever those issues might be. To me, it’s always ‘does this thing I’ve noticed actually impact the work, or my enjoyment of it in a meaningful way?’ If it doesn’t, and there aren’t any major issues, then hey, look, nobody’s perfect, and you did a good enough job otherwise, so thumbs up. If there are issues, and they’re a bit more meaningful, then… the work has some problems on its hands.

The Dark Pictures: The Devil In Me is a game I feel has some major issues preventing me from enjoying it. And while I’ve seen comments online, and heard comments made while I was streaming the game that say it’s objectively bad because what the characters did was not what the person commenting would do… I feel comments like those are only surface level, and if I’m really going to try and get into why I felt the game fell flat I think it’s more important to look at the bigger picture, and what these small issues represent on a larger scale.

The game follows the crew of Lonnit Entertainment, a true crime investigative team who specialize in digging up the history of famous old serial killers, as they receive an invitation to a replica of a hotel owned by H.H Holmes, with whom the game seems convinced was “The First American Serial Killer” (the only accurate word in that declaration is “American”). Upon arrival, however, their host disappears on them, and they start to clue in that none of this is quite what it seems. Soon, they find out that the replica hotel (supposedly) possesses just as many deathtraps as the real thing, and that somebody’s hunting them down, one by one. It’s up to the player to explore the hotel, solve puzzles, and make tough decisions, that’ll either mean escape for all five group members, or make sure they don’t make it out of the hotel alive…

Gameplay-wise, I’ll give it credit: it functions well. That might sound rather backhanded, but what I mean by that statement is that regardless of the elements around it, the skeleton of the game itself works. To its core: The Devil in Me is a game where you influence a story in motion and choose what the characters do, with the intent of determining whether they live or die. To this extent, it succeeds fairly well: for its rather small scale, the game does a good job of letting your choices influence the narrative, and the sections where you can potentially get characters killed… mostly feel fair — if you’re observant, and can key into the game’s logic, you can get everybody out okay. If you don’t, you can at least understand what went wrong, and how exactly your choice got that character killed. There are also some really effective individual setpieces, ones where you have to think your way out of a situation, that really work to amp up the stress and make you worry about whether you’re making the correct choice, and these sections… honestly do make it work as a horror game — keeping the stress level up for the rest of the runtime and… never really stopping once it gets started.

Unfortunately, it takes a long while to start. You might think, by my writeup above, that the main plot gets going rather quickly. It doesn't. The first four hours of what’s only a 7-8~ hour game are dedicated to having… basically nothing happen. Instead you’re subjected to endless gameplay segments of exploring the island and the mansion which take up so much time and establish nothing in the meantime. Other games by Supermassive had these sections too, but they were much shorter — and mostly served either to bridge two parts of the story together or represent something, such as you, as the player, trying to dig up info in a specific place. Here they felt so bloated, especially since there seem to be a lot more puzzles gating progress than I feel these games ever had: each character has their own unique talent they can use to interact with things around them (and none of them ever feel like they’re particularly potent or meaningful) there’s a whole system around object physics and using them as a stepping stone to continue your way into the next room you can’t find the exit to because the game is so poorly lit that after nightfall hits it’s almost impossible to see what’s around you. There’s one I particularly liked — one where the feeling like you’re getting lost seems intentional, in a way that diegetically leads you into a later plot point, but as a whole all the puzzles, all the parts where you had to traverse from point A to point B felt like padding. Like, maybe the intention of the first was to start the story slow and build up the characters, but…

…aside from one, maybe two of them I really didn’t feel the cast of five was all that well defined. A good majority of them feel like blank slates of people. While some people get traits or character beats attached to them, they seem rather superficially applied: one character has a whole scene stop to establish that they’re deathly afraid of heights, and then later on when he and another character have to walk across a plank over a sheer drop into the ocean… he just crosses it immediately, without the player’s input, without even so much as a reaction, and it’s the other dude who you have to navigate to the other side. Then, later, when the same guy is up in a lighthouse… suddenly he’s afraid of heights again? Literally the only distinct trait we’re given for him and it’s not even handled consistently. And also… it doesn’t really feel like anybody changes as people during the course of the story, or has some sort of arc. There are token gestures (oh, I’m a hardcore smoker because it helps with my Anxiety that definitely comes up through the game, totally, absolutely, but now that I’ve survived death island….... nah, I think I’m gonna quit…......) but it really feels like, for a game that at points seems as if it’s trying to personalize the death traps to the people going in them, you could have put switched them around and put them in other people’s situations and they all would’ve turned out the exact same. Which would be fine, maybe, if that wasn’t really meant to be a focus… but then at the end of the game, when it recaps who lived and who dies, it specifically states that the survivors lived because they learned and improved as people which, like… no they didn’t. That didn’t happen. Nothing about what you said impacted whether they lived or died or not. Don’t try to pretend you did more with the characters than you actually did.

And, like, going back to my preamble for a second, there are complaints I’ve read and heard about the game’s stories which maybe address the surface level of a problem, but also I feel like these things speak to deeper flaws in the overall construction. Yes, the killer teleporting everywhere and being able to keep up with the main characters is kind of mind-boggling and tiring (like, maybe it’s a reference to how Jason does this in some of the later F13 movies? but also why would you do a throwback to one of the most decried elements of those movies?) but it also speaks to how poorly defined the island is — where is anything on this island in relation to each other? How can the killer go back to chasing one group of characters, then head over to a different building that seems to be nowhere near where he was before and menace a different group of characters there, then just as easily go back to chasing the original group again? What’s the point in that whole segment where we put in the work to get away from him when he can instantly just catch up again? In addition… look, “the plot requires people to act stupid!” is more universal of a critique than the people who use it seem to realize: if whoever writes it can sell it well, then I’m totally willing to buy that maybe a character can be a dumbass and get himself into trouble. It’s much harder of a sell when I, as the player, am being forced to do… things that seem kinda blatantly suicidal in the name of progressing the plot forward. There’s a part of the game where you’re exploring a basement where I came into a room, explored, and found no way forward other than some locked doors a conveyor belt which the game made quite an effort to establish would be insanely dangerous for a human to enter. So I went “okay, so I won’t” and then looked up a walkthrough to see how to get through the locked door… only to find out that the only way out was to go on the conveyor belt. If the game maybe had a cutscene where, say, the character jumps on it because the killer was threatening them at that very moment and the conveyor belt was the only way out, I’d buy it (IIRC there’s a similar thing in Until Dawn during a chase scene) but when I, as the person trying to explore and escape the room, are repeatedly denied other options beside something I wouldn’t want to do… it gets grating. Real quick.

And honestly… the game as a whole felt fairly grating, given how much stuff there was obviously padding and how some of the stuff that isn’t is in service to… ‘develop’ characters who never really felt all that defined in the first place. There’s neat stuff — cool setpieces, and it does mostly work well as far as choice and consequence are concerned, but… I didn’t have a particularly fun time with this game. And when you look past the surface level stuff you see people point out and try and look at the bigger (dark) picture, these issues are painted by deeper problems overall, and given how these rot the frame in which this story is built on… I think this one needed to go back to the drawing board. 4/10.