I think it’s very funny how people claim this game killed Alone in the Dark. As if the franchise was thriving before this game threw all its momentum away. As if the franchise had an absolutely stellar reputation before this particular blight did it in. As if Alone in the Dark is even that much of a franchise at all, and not merely a dead IP from the 90s, occasionally defibrillated to cash in on its claim to fame of being ‘the very first survival horror.’ What originally set the stage for its genre — listed as a direct influence for 1996’s Resident Evil — has long since become an amalgamation of whatever trends happen to be most profitable at the time, each game past Alone in the Dark 3 being some sort of attempted reboot released ~8 years after the previous attempted reboot, doing its best to imitate whatever the newest Resident Evil is doing. Even the original trilogy wasn’t necessarily immune to changing up its approach: Alone in the Dark 2 is far more action-oriented than its predecessor ever was, for better or worse, and as a whole both 2 and 3 steer away from active horror, feeling more like Indiana Jones-esque romps which just so happen to have zombie ghosts as enemies. To say that Alone in the Dark: Illumination ‘killed’ or ‘betrayed’ the franchise — as most coverage of the game seems to — to me, is mostly an indication that you don’t know as much about the series as you say you do. This isn’t some sudden sellout. This one’s just… a bit more blatant about it. And a bit easier of a punching bag. Like, yeah, this game is dogshit, who could’ve guessed by the Metacritic score of 19, but unlike, say Alone in the Dark (2008), which is at least audacious in its baffling decisions and incredible dialogue, Illumination doesn’t even feel like it was even trying. And, frankly, that’s what truly damns it.

This time, the Alone in the Dark series has been re-imagined as a co-op zombie shooter, a la Left 4 Dead or Resident Evil 6. You get in a game with up to three of your friends, you each play different characters with different skillsets, and you barrel through legions of eldritch forces, solving…… ““puzzles”” to clear a path to the end of the campaign. What distinguishes this game most from its influences, however, is the genre crossover at play: not only is it a co-op zombie shooter, but it’s also a Unity Store asset flip. You know those random Steam Greenlight-looking games that look like shit, look like they play like shit, and always seem to top some publication or YouTuber’s year-end worst list because they’re easy enough targets not to make anybody actually mad they were called the worst game of the year? Yeah, Atari looked at those and decided they were gonna make one of their own.

And god, did they succeed.

Imagine Left 4 Dead except it sucks. Zombies (or, well, “The Creatures of Darkness”) spawn in wherever they feel like, often appearing right next to you without you even realizing it because there are no noises or feedback or anything that’ll let you know where they are aside from physically being able to see them. The core mechanic is that you light up things around the level to drastically reduce enemy defences, and, like, that mechanic is functional, I guess, but when you’re not in the light it’s impossible to tell if I’m even doing anything. Like, I can empty a full SMG clip into their face and they’ll be still standing and I have no idea whether I did damage or not because enemy health is high and there’s no feedback on anything you do to them. Several points where I was fighting this game’s equivalent of a tank, with an upgrade that let me circumvent the ‘enemies need to be in light to take full damage’ and I just had no idea whether they still needed to be in the light for me to hurt them because I was running out of ammo and they didn’t seem any more damaged than they were at the start.

It’s not just the combat that sucks, either: running is tied to this awful stamina system that runs out so quickly and then takes forever to come back, resulting in this loop where you’re stopping and starting, desperately trying to get to wherever you need to go yet at the same time constantly slowing to a total crawl. There’s virtually no diversity in objectives, it’s either fight through a stupid maze or collect [x key item] or go collect [x key item] in a stupid maze. The game is inconsistent about enemy density: a lot of the time it’ll flood you with dudes from the get-go, kill nearly your whole party, and then you’ll go the entire level barely encountering anything else. It also spawns roughly the same amount of enemies no matter how many people are playing, so unless you pick the easiest difficulties it’s almost impossible to do anything doing the game singleplayer. And this presumes that the game chooses to work: that everything goes as intended, that some objective doesn’t break, that the platform you need to jump onto has a visible model, that the explosive you just armed actually bothers to explode, that the game doesn’t suddenly change up how you pick up items for one level, causing you and your party to think the game has bugged out and left you unable to pick up a thing you need to progress. Getting through this game is partially about changing variables until you find a combination that doesn’t softlock you.

I’m going to use the very second level as an example here: me and my friends start the level, we go down an elevator only for it to break, our first objective being to fix it. We’re made to get three batteries. The level only spawns in two. We play for a bit before we proceed to realize the level isn’t actually winnable in this state, so we switch to easy difficulty. The good news: the level actually spawns in all the things we need to pass it. The bad news: sometimes when you put a battery into the machine the game just eats it, taking it from your inventory but then not proceeding to actually advance the objective. We think it’s a problem where we’re placing a battery where there already is a battery, but no, the game’s just broken. We brute force it, and no matter what we always get one battery eaten, and we can’t pass the section. I then switch to doing it singleplayer… and it works fine. I get the batteries with no problem, and after several more sections of having to find [x collectable] in a maze (including one where I have to find a battery that’s just… plopped on the ground right in front of me, right by the thing I need to put it into) I clear the level. I save the run. Me and my friends can go through the rest of the campaign, for better or worse.

Again, that was only the second level. And that’s a glitch, obvious from the outset, that makes progressing through the game impossible without a workaround. Of the game's three main campaigns, only one is possible to clear all the way through in the game’s multiplayer mode. You can tell they really put their care into this game.

There are four main characters you can choose between — and, by extension, four classes you can pick, defined by the weapons and special skills each given to them. The Hunter’s unique mechanic is that he’s limited by ammo constraints. The game intends for him to be The Guns Guy, yet it’s him who must scrounge for ammo while The Engineer and The Priest just get… infinite ammo on their weapons? For the Engineer, that infinite ammo gun is meant to be secondary to their ability to scavenge resources to put mines on the ground… but even if you actually get an enemy to step on them they do jack shit. At the very least, they have an infinite ammo sidearm that’s considerably more useful… but then, as what happened to my friend, sometimes the game just glitches out and doesn’t let you use said gun, forcing you into laying endless mines, all next to each other, in hopes that maybe they’ll actually do something. Priest… man I don’t even know what Priest even does. They have an infinite ammo sidearm just like Engineer but then also sometimes they erupt in a bright flash of light which doesn’t seem to do anything to enemies but sure does make it so that nobody on the team can fucking see anything for the next few seconds. The Witch… oh man. In lieu of traditional weapons, the Witch can instead enchant a light source to do DoT to any enemies in it (useless) or fire a lightning bolt at enemies to fry them. This is limited by both cast time and mana: if you run out of mana, no more spells unless you happen to find a crystal ball to get it all back instantly, or wait for the manual recharge of one mana every five seconds.

It takes ten mana to cast a lightning bolt.

What usually happens to the Witch is this: once the initial volley floods you with enemies, you immediately use up all your mana only for that to merely be a dent in the horde. With nothing else to protect you, you’re near-completely defenseless as the horde proceeds to mob you to death. Theoretically, levelling up will increase your mana recharge/improve your quality of life, but beyond the rather small gains levelling up gives you, you often die so early without party intervention (and the other party members usually have their own drama to deal with) that you don’t gain nearly enough EXP to level up. And even should you survive that opening volley it’s not like you’re not a liability: I was Hunter, my friend was Witch during… this game’s equivalent of a campaign finale, and literally I had to run around, scrounge for ammo, kill the enemies who dropped the items I needed to then be able to damage the boss… while all my Witch buddy could do was superficially shoot lightning bolts and hope that maybe those did damage. Playing Witch is a catch-22 at its core: you start without anything that’ll truly help you contribute to the team and survive the campaign without gaining a couple of levels first, but then because EXP is based on killing enemies/surviving the campaign you don’t actually get the stuff that’ll help you contribute to the team. All the classes (bar Priest) are to some degree pretty borked, pretty counterintuitive, pretty not amazing to play, but man, the design ethos behind playing the Witch is truly something special.

The online, as expected, does not quite work wonders. Admittedly I could be the problem here: I’m Australian, and was primarily playing with Americans/a Norwegian, but even then this is more a “these are funny things that happened” footnote than something I’m honestly gonna fault the game for. The netcode is rough: fatal errors abound, sometimes from being dead too long, sometimes because the game’s just being a Gemini. While my Norwegian friend managed to stick around for most of the first campaign, from the second campaign on it honestly became a bit of a race to see how long we could last before the game eventually took him from us, like a leaf on the wind. One of my other friends pretty consistently got stuck on things and had to wriggle himself out. On one of my other other friends ends I went through some real shit: at one point one of the not!Tanks knocked me down, but on said friend’s end I never got back up, and I was picking up batteries and shooting enemies while sliding across the floor. After a certain point in the campaign I’d randomly inherit the Engineer’s ability to see the auras of light sources all the way across the map upon their death. One time, after they died, they randomly got to free-roam the map and went so high into the skybox they saw God and crashed the game for everybody Another time I guess I just jumped weirdly and after that point was stuck in the falling animation, this expression perpetually stuck on my face. That wasn’t just a thing on my friend’s end, either, oftentimes people would jump weirdly and then just start floating off the ground, nyooming around at the speed of slow. As a whole, when the game wasn’t softlocking or denying progress or doing the things that otherwise made playing it rather intolerable, it was at least rather funny to see the trashfire in motion.

Ultimately… I think, perhaps, talking this much about what makes Alone in the Dark: Illumination rather awful is a bit of a needless endeavour — I feel like the virgin wojak going on for paragraphs and paragraphs while the chad just goes ‘this shit sucks.’ But frankly, I’m just amazed at what’s on display here. I really got the brainworms just playing through it, and honestly just trying to gather my thoughts and write up on everything I wanted to talk about was a ton of fun. This might just be a cash-grab asset flip — or maybe even some attempt to hold onto the IP; like how they kept making Hellraiser sequels just so Clive Barker wouldn’t get the rights back — and it might be a dogshit Left 4 Dead clone, but there’s a difference between knowing something is bad and knowing just how it falls short. And honestly, this was bad in much more interesting ways than I was led to believe going in. From the borked, buggy gameplay and netcode, from how I legitimately had to fight the game just so I and my party could progress, from how none of the characters you can play work the way they’re supposed to, from how the game honest-to-god has a “A Winner Is You!”-type ending in fucking 2015, Alone in the Dark: Illumination is a gem. So much so we have to throw it back down the mineshaft. 1/10.

Past the original 90s trilogy, the Alone in the Dark series has, uh, been through some tough times. With the title and influence of having been ‘the very first survival horror game’ there’s enough of a selling point in the IP for Atari/Infogrames to try and cash in every eight years — making some sort of attempted reboot, following whatever trends in survival horror are popular at the time — yet not with enough real thought and care to make them any good. Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare, released in 2001, was one of the many fixed-camera, third-person survival horrors to release in the wake of Resident Evil taking over the world, yet unlike other contemporaries (such as Silent Hill or Fatal Frame), New Nightmare never quite iterates enough to feel like its own thing, and for the most part mostly feels like a copy — and not quite an amazing one. Alone in the Dark 2008 is fucking wild: it’s got the action-oriented approach of Resident Evil 4, the parkour of Uncharted, and is also just so ambitious with every stupid mechanic it has that even if it’s certainly not great it still manages to find that special place in my heart. Alone in the Dark: Illumination is like if they made Left 4 Dead 2 but also if they made it shit: even beyond being a Unity asset flip with awful netcode the combat and gameplay are so fundamentally borked that it’s a marvel to see. Atari lost the rights to the series after this point — having sold the IP to THQ Nordic in 2018-ish — and yet, even despite the series going from one publisher to another, some things always stay the same: Alone in the Dark (2024) is another attempted reboot. And once again, it's a mishmash of what’s hot in survival horror.

At least they leaned into the trends pretty well, this time!

Alone in the Dark (2024) is quite a lot of different things, none of them original. The most obvious inspiration is 2019’s remake of Resident Evil 2, what with its third-person-over-the-shoulder angle, its in-game map showing which areas you’ve ‘completed’ and which you still need to find things in, the ability to switch skins between modern and retro models, even the animation for using an item on a lock is taken straight from the RE Engine. A lot of the game’s segmentation seems rather inspired by, from what I understand, Alan Wake — where there are clearly defined sections where you interact with NPCs, solve puzzles, try to find the centre of the mystery at hand, juxtaposed with sections that are primarily combat: scavenging for ammo and health, fighting enemies, going through setpiece after setpiece down a linear path before you reach the end and switch back to solving puzzles. I laughed so hard the first time there was a switch and the game’s soundtrack started playing the fucking Hereditary horns. As a whole, the game is… not exactly making itself its own thing. What it does is employ its inspirations well. It by and large picks and chooses things that worked well, employs them in a way that lets them mesh well with each other, and while it may not reinvent the wheel, and while it might not necessarily iterate on these systems, it works well for what it is.

What I think I like most is its structure, and how it uses its area design to play into that. Decerto Manor is, in application, sort of your hub world. You talk to the various denizens, you solve puzzles to scavenge out rooms and access new wings of the mansion, and, once your exploration takes you to what seems like a dead end, the walls of the mansion twist and turn around you, sending you out into a nightmare world… quite different in biome than the mansion you were just going through. These are mostly combat-focused — interspersed with the occasional puzzle where you get rid of whatever’s stopping you from going down the linear path forward — but what gets me is just how varied they look. You go from a French streetside to a swamp to a churchyard to a harbour to a couple places I don’t wanna spoil, and even the one time it used the city streets again enough, it felt changed enough to still feel like I was somewhere new. It honestly reminds me of just how well the original Alone in the Dark trilogy utilized its set dressing, and it’s so awesome to see that aspect get leaned into here too, even as more and more disparate biomes start connecting themselves to the mansion. I also really enjoyed when the lines between hub and level became blurred — when the room you’re scrounging through suddenly changes and you have to fight a couple of enemies off (even if I hope a patch makes the transitions, uh, a bit more smooth looking), or even when you enter a new area… and it’s a giant puzzle box, the occasional enemy not getting in the way of how you have to primarily figure out the way forward. Throughout the game I was eagerly anticipating where it’d take me next, what new part of the mansion I’d get to unlock, what kind of places I’d be suddenly sent to, and as a whole I loved how the game used physical location to segment its action-heavy sections with its downtime. Really neat to see in action.

I also enjoy how reverent this game is to the original Alone in the Dark trilogy. References aren’t new — all the attempted reboots post New Nightmare try to relate to the '90s trilogy in some way — but this one goes beyond, not just copy-posting names or basic wiki-skim-info just so maybe somebody who went through the original games can do the Leo pointing meme, but genuinely attempting to tie in with their lore while yet choosing to go in its own direction. I was expecting a… faithful-ish reboot, the opening section of you exploring the mansion mirroring the opening cutscene of the original where you go up into the attic, but then the game pulls out the rug from under you and shows that the mansion is filled with people and lets you know, immediately, that this is going to be something different, but yet something that took the care to relate itself to the original game in a way that’s more than surface level. I was surprised, for example, that the game brings up Slaughter Gulch, the attempted movie production that sets up the premise of Alone in the Dark 3: it’s such a random deep-cut reference that you’re going to have to have played that game to get, yet it’s brought up without much of a second thought. Characters familiar to the original trilogy appear, and are reminiscent of who they were then, but are re-imagined for a partially new setting in a way that almost feels seamless, taking the original’s loose cosmic horror and leaning into it in a totally new way. It’s not a rejection of the past, nor is it something that merely pays lip service, this is a game for those who’ve done a deep dive into the original Alone in the Dark trilogy. I’m… not quite sure how many people (especially these days) have actually done that, but it’s kinda awesome to see how the game goes for it anyway.

Combat is, uh, notably clunky. The gunplay works fairly well: they have a good bit of power to them, but this is in conjunction with how hard it is to hit enemies with them. They jolt and weave, duck their head down as they rush towards you, strafe around you faster than you can keep a bead on them… your gun does a good job at killing them, but first you’ll need to hit them, and it’s more often than not that you’ll run out of ammo trying to hit the not!Molded creatures present in the dark. The game does well with resource management in a way that encourages you to keep switching between your modes of combat — breakable melee weapons, picking and choosing which type of ammo you get — and doesn’t let you settle for just one thing… it’s just that two of the three things you can do are rather clunky. I have no idea what the strategy with melee combat is. You kinda just wait for an enemy to get in range, hope you can interrupt them with your first swing, and then spam the melee attack button and hope they run out of health before they can get an attack off. Apparently I can hold the button to do an extra strong melee attack. I never, ever got a chance to actually use it.

The third option for combat is… distractions — bricks and bottles and Molotov cocktails lying around the environment, which, despite the game’s explicit directions, you’re meant to throw directly at enemies to damage them, as opposed to trying to divert their attention. There are two ways to use this, neither of them exactly practical: you can hold the button to hold onto it, letting you arc your throw and also walk extremely slowly to wherever the next encounter happens to be… or just press the button to immediately yeet it on the surface of wherever you picked it up, sometimes auto-aiming at an enemy if they happen to be near. No option to like, pick something up and use it later, you have to either throw it away or force yourself to trudge over to the next opportunity to hit something with it, and while they’re… maybe effective? at doing damage to enemies? it doesn’t quite make up for how janky they feel to use, nevermind how the game doesn’t even explain them properly. As a whole, is the combat good? No, I’d say it’s only one-third of the way there (nevermind how any encounter where multiple enemies corner you will immediately result in you being stunlocked to death just like the original Alone in the Dark in a way that makes the final boss, in particular a rather rough experience) but I’d hesitate to call it bad: even at its worst it’s still perfectly functional, if janky. And, frankly, for a game like this? It adds to the charm. Mostly.

Some loose notes: nottttttttttttt quite sure how I feel regarding the casting of TV actors as the leads? I picked Carnby, so I spent most of the game with Stranger Things’ David Harbour, and for the most part… he was fine? He does a mostly decent noir detective, even if sometimes it's kinda clear he’s reading off a script? I’m just not especially sure what he brings to the table compared to a more professional voice actor, at least aside from name recognition (I streamed this for friends, and one of them immediately recognized ‘Hopper’ the moment they saw him, so I guess that was who the casting was meant to appeal to?), but by and large I guess he did okay enough not to raise too many of my eyebrows. By and large, I love a lot of the background lore, love how they modernized the way the original Alone in the Dark read out its notes to the player… not sure how I feel like a lot of the more traditional cutscenes: it felt like the game was slowing to a halt so characters could exposit things to one another and it didn’t really feel like the correct approach for a game such as this. I like the soundtrack — how it carries a bunch of different influences with, like, noir jazz, southern folk music, the aforementioned Hereditary horns — enough maybe to check it out outside the context of the game. The retro skins are hilarious and absolutely worth the price of admission: talking to people and encountering eldritch horrors as this weird polygon man honestly brought such a smile to my face. I’d… maybe wait for a patch before I buy this, perhaps? There were enough points where Carnby got stuck on the environment, enough points where the game couldn’t land a transition, enough weird graphical things to perhaps get in the way of the experience. It wasn’t enough to be a dealbreaker on my end (I knew what I was getting into buying this day one), but it was enough to be noticeable, and enough to get in the way, especially when it happened during enemy encounters.

Ultimately, though, this was fun! Perhaps not perfect, or even great — the combat is rouuuuuuuuugh, and I’d… never quite say the game rises above its influences, or even does much to differentiate itself from them — but as a whole, as far as reboots of Alone in the Dark go, I’m glad to see one that mostly sticks the landing. With a reverence for the source material which shows in every familiar character you meet, every note you pick up, in conjunction with being a pretty solid survival horror in its own right… it’s certainly not the best thing in the world, but I’d honestly still call this a good time. I’m hoping this sells well enough for this to maybe revive the franchise a bit. I’d love to see a sequel that iterates on both the good and bad here. And I’d love to see just how they choose to cover the remaining two of the trilogy. Here's hoping. 7/10.

The second of three winter-themed games Nitrome released to close out 2007, and of the three, the one that hews closest to what Nitrome’s bread-and-butter is at this point. All the hallmarks are here: arcadey 2D platformer centred around a core mechanic (in this case, being able to slide on the ice, both as a method to attack enemies and as a way to rapidly gain speed going down a slope), where the game does a good job at introducing new things to keep in mind via new platform types and enemies, which perhaps dips a bit in quality once levels become really long and losing sends you right back to the start. Snow Drift mostly manages to mitigate that last issue, though! If, mainly, because it’s kind enough to pepper the level with enough health ups to at least make the endurance tests much more feasible. Not to say the levels still aren’t difficult, or… rough, in some places, but it becomes much less of a weakness when it only takes four or five attempts to make it through, as opposed to, like, 10+ tries. And it means that you don’t necessarily get tired of what’s specifically fun about this: having to position yourself carefully so you can jump over an enemy and then slide into them from behind, how certain sections constantly keep you on your feet and don’t let you let up right until they’re over, and how whenever you slide its a crapshoot as to whether you’ll be allowed to drift freely or whether the game will throw a random obstacle at you that you’re suddenly gonna have to react to. It’s fun, if not quite smoothed out — felt like there were some weird things with hurtboxes, and there’s this one enemy where getting past him without taking damage felt like kind of a crapshoot — but as a whole this was fun! Definitely the first of their more traditional platformers to really feel like it sticks the landing.

Nitrome’s second racing game! Much better than the first one! …Not much to say, otherwise. This is a game that’s evidently meant to be played multiplayer, and the fact that this can go up to four players yet at the same time can only be played on a single keyboard perhaps speaks to why it feels… rather limited, compared to the games surrounding it. You move your UFO around the track by tapping the boost button over and over again, you turn to try and avoid hitting obstacles or falling off the course, you complete three laps and win. There are only three courses, only two unique obstacles, and not even any AI UFOs to race against — doing the game singleplayer merely has you racing against the clock, which leaves a game that’s… effectively ‘done’ in ten minutes. Evidently, this was more meant to be something endlessly replayable — something for whenever the eight-year-old me had free time at the computer lab and four friends all willing to play Twister on the keyboard — though even then I’m not sure this has enough here to return to after a couple runthroughs of each of the racetracks. More like a demo for further multiplayer capabilities — and, perhaps, for the non-zero amount of racing games Nitrome would make after this point — rather than something that really stands on its own.

I’ve talked about movie games before. Games that are very clearly styled after Hollywood films, evidently want to be just like them… that maybe are attempting to push away from being deemed mere video games. It’s interesting how that particular part of the mindset has started to evolve, as while games have been taking influence from movies for a long time, it seems like a lot of earlier efforts on this front seemed to encourage their interactivity: effectively being movies you directly played through, games where the narrative, and how you played within it, took centre stage. Take, for example, Phantasmagoria: a B-movie in video-game form. The Shining by way of Suspiria. A game that truly understands that part of the value of something like itself is the camp. You can go to the office of the real estate agent who sold you your haunted house to find him straight up nuzzling a ‘client’ of his, draping himself all over her legs like he’s a fucking pomeranian. You’re at a picnic, mourning how your husband’s become such a jerk after you released a demon from its slumber, and then suddenly some guy pops up and is like “help, help, my mum’s trapped in your barn,” causing you to to find this fucking gnome of a woman trapped in the rafters. You get her out, partially by using a pulley hook to give her a wedgie, find out that they’ve both been squatting in your barn… to which their response is to suggest you give them jobs, to which you immediately acquiesce. You then, the next day, go on a journey with one of these squatters to a greenhouse, where you find a random telescope lying, which you then use to find out… your house has a window on the outside that isn’t there on the inside. You can only find that out by going on that journey and looking into that telescope. You can’t just… look at your house, or anything. I love adventure games.

Though what I think works best about this is how Phantasmagoria juxtaposes the more goofy elements with how it pulls out the rug from under you, delivering at times a genuinely creepy, genuinely effective narrative. I really liked exploring the mansion day by day: searching through all the nooks and crannies, unlocking doors/finding secrets/breaking down walls which then expands and uncovers the full zone of the house as something much larger than you initially thought, all in the name of uncovering the supernatural mystery within the walls and trying to get out of it alive. I like the way the game balances both the horror and tragedy of its premise. The way Don, the player character’s husband, starts to lose himself and shift into abuse under the demon’s effects makes you dread whenever he shows up, and at times it feels real in a way that gets genuinely, genuinely uncomfortable, in a way that still has an awareness and understanding of the subject matter it's getting into. The scene with Adrienne crying on her bed, knowing that even despite the moments of brief lucidity her husband is gone... some of the stuff here plays a bit awkwardly with the adventure gameplay, and the wackier tone, but man if it doesn’t become genuinely haunting at points. And gnarly, too: the game knows where exactly to toe the line, and while the horror elements themselves generally lean on the sillier side there’s enough of an underline in which it backs it all up: a real solid, surreal, sinister atmosphere, very good practical effects, and some rather brutal imagery make this a very solid horror experience, both when it’s taking itself seriously and when it’s distinctly not.

What I love, too, is how the game… really does its best to avoid the pitfalls a lot of adventure games of the time fell into, either willingly or because that was the time. Most interactions/puzzles are fairly simplified: either click on an item to interact with it yourself, or use an item to see whether it's applicable to use or not. There’s very little pixel hunting: if there’s something on screen you can interact with, the game’s cursor will light up, removing any question as to whether you’re missing something the game randomly chose to obscure from you. The hint system will always point the player in the correct direction while doing its best to not outright tell you anything you don’t immediately need to know. It also does its best to keep the player from softlocking, not having any out-and-out fail states up until the very end and making sure puzzles in that vein have multiple solutions available, giving you an out if you missed the chance to pick up an item beforehand (or if reloading a save caused said item to vanish into the ether). This also extends to stuff you don’t even need to actually beat the game: you have multiple different opportunities to find out about stuff regarding the backstory/lore of the manor, multiple ways to get the information you might want to know, entire plot threads you can look into or ignore depending on if you stumbled across the same info somewhere else. That entire final section is ace, by the way: it’s a mad scavenger hunt through the house as the buildup finally pays off and the game finally starts bringing the knives out. Do you have everything you need to complete the game? If not, can you survive long enough against your pursuer to get what you need? I’m honestly a little sad I’d gone through the chapter as quickly as I did, because it branches it off in so many different ways, with all the different branching paths and all the different things that can happen as you try and grab everything you need. Would’ve been awesome to see in action.

Though at that point, admittedly, I was loosely trying to get the game to end as quick as I could because… I do think the pacing is a bit of a problem, here. While it’s kind of awesome to see just how many different FMV animations there are, and how they all interact with the environment, they kind of make the game super slow. Adrienne cannot merely do what you point her towards doing, she must stand there, staring off into the distance, pondering for about four or five seconds before she (slowly) takes any course of action. Going from one end of the house to the other, as the game is wont to make you do, is an exercise of having to continually skip traversal cutscenes until you finally get to where you need to go… right before your next objective is somewhere else far off from where you currently are. And that’s assuming the player knows where they’re actually meant to be going, and not merely just aimlessly wandering trying to figure out what they’re meant to do next, or where the hint they have is pointing them. The game’s propensity to give you multiple ways to know what you might need to know is both a blessing and a curse: while it’s helpful, the problem is unless you know what you’re doing and are beelining it for the end you’re very much likely to run into the game crawling to a halt to tell you something somebody else already told you. Sometimes they’re cute little interactions with some of the more offbeat characters in the game. More often than they’re not they just feel rather dry, as you go through an NPC’s dialogue bit by bit until finally you feel free to go. It’s a slow burn, and for the most part I like that it’s a slow burn, but I do feel like sometimes that loosely works against itself: you can stop and smell the roses for a bit too long when all the other passengers just want to get back on the road, and that’s extra rough when the process of forward progress itself can feel rather sluggish.

But even if it drags its heels in a bit more than I personally would’ve liked I’d still say Phantasmagoria still stands out: within both the context of the early FMV craze and amongst its 90s adventure game contemporaries. If you’re willing to go at the game’s pace, if you make a point to explore and take in the atmosphere without the looming threat of something preventing you from completing the game, if you’re not like me and maybe give it a couple sessions rather than attempting to beat it all in one go, you’ve really got something special here. In both senses of the word. 7/10.

I’ve always felt like choice-based games get a bit of an unfair reputation.

And I’m not really sure how much of it is warranted or not. While the critique of “your choices don’t matter” levied ever since Telltale’s The Walking Dead came out is… certainly fair in regards to how a lot of games try to handle player choice, I do feel like at least a little bit of it is gamers hearing the phrase “your choices shape the narrative” and stretching it way beyond what would actually be feasible. Like, it's true that maybe games bottleneck you into the same setpieces/results regardless of what you do… but also the alternative requires wayyyyyyyy more scale than is even possible for a lot of these developers. As a fan of these sorts of games, it’s… mostly just an unwritten rule that there’s only so much a game can really branch out, and that when a game is truly capable of accounting for what the player does, it’s something special.

Until Dawn is one of those games.

The story follows eight young adults, one year after a prank caused the untimely deaths of their friends Hannah and Beth Washington. When the group is invited by Josh, the brother of the two deceased, to come back to the cabin where they died and celebrate their anniversary, as a method of commiserating and also moving on. However, it soon becomes clear that there’s some sort of malevolent force hunting down and attempting to kill the party, and it's up to you, the player, to take control of each character, go through QTE segments, make choices, and determine whether everybody dies, or manages to survive until dawn.

And… man, when this game says your choices matter, they really do. There are limits, obviously — the plot itself mostly goes down the same path and there are some characters who’ll stick around longer before they have a chance to die — but in regards to having the choices you make cause rifts and have repercussions down the line. Things that seem innocuous in the moment might come back later to make survival that much harder — if not just kill them outright. You’re even given a certain amount of leeway to determine what the characters are like: you can have jock Mike be the Ash Williams of the game… or you can have him be a total weenie who gets his ass kicked every time it's up to him to step up to the plate. You can have Emily and her rebound Matt bond together and have some genuinely cute moments together… or have them bicker at each other the whole way in a sea of pettiness. The possibilities… aren’t endless, but there’s a lot you can do, and for a game to be able to reach that sort of scale is honestly pretty incredible. I can’t stress that enough.

There’s… not really a lot that holds it back, honestly, though the bits that do are there and present and definitely knock it down a little bit. I say ‘bits’ when really the main one I want to talk about are the Don’t Move segments. See, in addition to QTEs (which… I’m fine with though I do wish certain life-or-death situations weren’t based on them), there are also other segments where you’re made to hold the controller and keep it absolutely still (because the PS4 controller has a motion sensor in it), causing you to fail if you move the controller outside the zone you started the event in. This is… kind of a fun way to implement motion controls in theory, but… it's very unforgiving. The zone you’re given is very small, to the point where even breathing can move you enough to make you fail which… as someone who gets muscle twitches is very rough but even regardless of that it's very easy to fail in a way that doesn’t feel like it's your fault. I can assume that this was a complaint for many both because I’ve seen a lot of people talk about it and also because I know how heavily nerfed they were in The Quarry (though that might just be because not every console has motion sensors), but it's sad to see something that… genuinely could’ve been a fun twist on the QTE formula work out as badly as it does.

…I realize, now that I’m this far into the review, that Until Dawn is… a bit of a hard game to review. Both because at least a little bit of it is wrapped up in spoiler stuff (tl;dr the story does a thing that’s spoilers that’s also a thing I absolutely love to see in fiction) but also a lot of what makes it work so well is… less in how it plays more in how it unfolds, which kind of makes it hard to describe for a text review like this. I’m not generally fond of seeing reviews that are just vague “try it, you won’t regret it,” but… if you’re into stuff based around player choice and you’re willing to look past sometimes iffy teen-movie writing and rough motion controls I really recommend you check this out. It’s one of the best Telltale-esque adventure games out there. 9/10.

And also, since one of my friends asked, here’s my character ranking of the eight teens, top to bottom best to worst:

Mike — easily one of the most malleable characters in terms of how you can portray him which is fascinating to see. I love my absolute loser <3
Emily — kind of loosely fun but mostly there for the first half of the game but once chapter 7 hits god she just steals the show. her shoving Ashley through the door <3
Josh — gets some of the most… weird 40-year-old-writing-teenager-lines but I’m really into how he’s portrayed and what he does in the plot
Chris — he’s generally fun and I like his relationship with Ashley, nothing much to say here he’s pretty cool
Jessica — sadly is out of focus for most of the game but I loved her before she ended up disappearing, she gets so many fun moments
Ashley — a bit too low-key of a personality but I like her general vibe and her relationship with Chris
Matt — has the same issue as Jessica but sticks out more because he has less of a personality
Sam — has the same issue with Matt in terms of personality but sticks out more because she's around the whole game

Bad games are a whole lot better so long as the gameplay is bearable. That sounds… like a bit of an obvious statement, I know, but there’s a fairly core difference between, say, combat that’s kind of broken and/or mindless and combat that’s just brutal and awful and a slog. Even if they’re otherwise comparable, even if I otherwise wouldn’t call the gameplay good, I still feel like a lot of what defines my feelings is ‘how fun is this to play?’ It’s not the be-all-end-all, of course — if something is very obviously more of a narrative experience I’m not gonna be like ‘but where’s the part where i shoot the enemy combatants...’ — but even if I like or even love a lot of the other moving parts my overall feelings can be absolutely tanked if the part of the experience I’m directly controlling feels painful to interface with. And sometimes, even when… nothing really works the way it should, having gameplay feel more like you’re going through the motions rather than slogging through whichever unintentional, awful challenge the developers cooked up can be the difference between disliking something and hating it.

What I’m saying is that Afterfall: InSanity is fairly abjectly not a good game. It’s at least, however, the type of not-good game where it's mostly just… mindless and unable to stand up against the player, as opposed to something where you’re fighting against it every step of the way. Which, after having gone through a good amount of games recently with absolutely awful combat, is refreshing! Even as entertaining as the other experiences were, I’m definitely happy to go through something like this. Sometimes it’s nice to not have to earn your victories.

The game takes place in an alternate universe from our own, where after Germany developed nukes, the resulting nuclear apocalypse resulted in… Poland, of all places, holding the last remnants of humanity in an underground bunker. Fast forward 90 years, and you play as Albert Tokaj, a psychologist, who after being sent on a routine mission to help some scientists finds that the shelter has been overrun by confinement syndrome, a contagious mental illness with zombie-like symptoms that also just… mutates you? and turns you into this weird fishman muscle freak thing? not sure of the definition there. Albert soon starts to find that a great conspiracy is afoot in the now-infested shelter, he must now figure out who is friend and foe as he fights through the shelter, up through the tunnels, and onto the ravaged world above, all the while pursuing the one who caused the syndrome to leak: a man of mysterious motives, who seemingly knows everything about Albert and who has big plans for him and if you can guess what the big plot twist is already then great job. It’s not subtle.

And I think the ‘plot’ — or, well, the game’s attempts at making this a deep psychological thriller — is by far the most entertaining thing about this. Not even the fact that this is attempting to be Fight Club but also you’re fighting weird fishman zombie things, but the dissonance of it all: you, as the player, spending five minutes travelling through a low saturation hallway, hacking up every monster that comes for you without hesitation, only for Albert to take out his PDA and insist that these are only people with mental health problems and how it’s so tragic that the mysterious saboteur released the contagious mental illness that also mutates your body. You beat down enemies by the horde and then the moment a cutscene all it takes is a guy waving his arm vaguely in your direction for your body to be splayed on the ground. There’s an early segment where you must flee the complex after being accused of crimes you insist you’re innocent of, and then the very first combat sequence has you grab a fire axe, chop both a guard’s arms off before smashing his head in. The plot doesn’t even need to be all that dissonant with the game to be absolutely wild, it manages to achieve that on its own. From little things, like the goofy animations and a main voice actor who has trouble feeling any more than mild irritation to everything around him, to the big things, like just… how many twists and turns there, how many times seemingly important characters drop out of the plot while in the same breath trying to give reverence to characters/plot beats that don’t mean anything at all, and how little sense anything makes. There are these action setpieces that the game tries to let you play through and they’re amazing: all the animations look so slow and stilted, its attempts to be cool feel so comical, it’s great. The story’s great. Real so-bad-it’s-incredible vibes.

And, unlike most other games of that ilk, it’s at least bearable to play. Not good, certainly, but in a way that benefits the player than makes the experience frustrating and unbearable to go through. At the beginning of the game, when you get the combat tutorial, you’re told you can press the left mouse button to attack and the right mouse button to block. You never, ever actually need to block: you have enough health (and enough health regen) that most encounters can’t really whittle you down even if they land a hit, and it takes you being overwhelmed, without the resources to really fight back to actually die, in which case trying to block doesn’t really help your case. The core combat effectively comes down to walking up to enemies and attacking them hard and fast enough to hitstun them to death, and while most weapons are kinda pathetic and do nothing, the game is generous enough with the actually good weapons that you just constantly receive copies of them, almost as if it's compensating for a weapon durability system that isn’t there. What this basically means is that you have a gun or a fire axe, you can walk up to an enemy and slapfight them to death with rigid, clunky movesets and animations. It’s not good, by any means, but it’s at least a little fun in how mindless it is to unga bunga people to death.

It gets rouuuuuugh in the last stretch, though. The game decides that it’s going to be combat combat combat, instead of interspersing puzzles in-between, and also, for some reason, to really restrict the weapons and resources you get: melee weapons completely disappearing and ammo for your larger weapons becoming rather scarce. There now exists this new mechanic where Albert cannot step into direct sunlight without ghost bat harpies spawning en masse and swooping on you constantly, wasting your already scarce ammo because they’re hard to hit and completely disabling your health regeneration, as you’re still technically in combat while they do barely any damage to you and you don’t have the means to damage them. This meshes badly with how enemies now badly pack a punch, and dying often sends you super far back checkpoint-wise, forcing you to do the same sections over and over again just for a chance to make it past the one actually hard section fifteen minutes of gameplay in the future. The game also decides that it wants to do boss fights, and they’re even more clunky than regular combat is, combining a lot of the above factors with clunky mechanics and rather large health pools to create… not quite the big, memorable climactic setpiece that was intended. Quite the opposite, actually.

At least, though, it’s not quite a sheer drop from ‘bad but funny’ into ‘genuinely kind of awful’ as, say, an Alone in the Dark 2008: while it’s certainly rougher, and maybe doesn’t quite contain the same stupid charm the combat did initially, it never truly becomes a slog, and the story at least keeps up the entertainment value even if the last stretch of gameplay shows signs of falling apart. Ultimately, would I call Afterfall: InSanity a good ga- oh almost certainly not. It’s a mess and a half, not even counting how it can’t even be played anymore due to its unlicensed use of Unreal Engine, but as far as bad games go, it’s one of the ones that manages to provide an entertaining experience because of how silly it feels, and, as far as games like that goes, it’s at least a good deal easier and more… “fun” to play than quite a lot of its ilk. 3/10.

Brief context: in the early 90s or so Capcom decided to outsource some… ports? of the early Mega Man games for the original Gameboy. I say ‘port’ with a question mark because… these are fairly heavily changed from the original — even putting aside obvious technical limitations — and… stand out for the worse in doing so. Like, beyond the technical stuff of your super large hurtbox and how the small screen means you have much less room to maneuver… look I know even the NES games lean towards the ‘cheap’ side of difficulty but at least there it doesn’t feel as brutal as this does, between the stone walls that are some of these enemy placements, the required leaps of faith you have to take, and just how much damage some of the bosses can do to you. Almost feels like some sort of Kaizo Mega Man, except without much of the charm that a lot of Kaizo games tend to have with their difficulty. Combine that with how the structure of the stage order… directly kind of makes half the weapons you select useless right as you manage to get them all, and… this series of ports as a whole isn’t exactly great. I’ll confess that this is probably the best of the three I’ve played so far — the initial weapons aren’t as useless and there’s some moments of fun stage design — but, like, I’ve already played through the original Mega Man 3 (and Mega Man 4, given this game is a partial port of that, too) several times, what’s there here other than a budget version for the gamers who didn’t have an NES back in the day? 5/10.

While not the first Nitrome game I played, nor the one that drew me to the site in the first place, this was the first game to really hook me in (pun unintended). While Space Hopper hadn’t held my interest, this one had: leading seven-year-old me to spend his entire period in the computer lab trying to get as far as he could, eventually compelling him to play the other games on the site: both within the (much, much smaller) backlog at the time, and actively awaiting for new games to release so I could play those as well. Sixteen (fuck I’m old) years later… this holds up! While I didn’t particularly remember anything about the level design — the little snapshots in my head all seemed to be from this game’s sequel, actually — I was surprised to find that playing this again did unearth some memories, my brain in particular adding the exact same mental lyrics to the background music as I did when I was seven years old. I don’t think this was exactly the exact nostalgic experience I was particularly expecting — I think I’d have to reach 2008’s output to really get the ‘oh my god this was the thing I used to play while I was a Childe!’ brainworms — but it was neat to revisit this.

Speaking of the game itself, though, it… almost feels kind of like a spiritual successor to Feed Me than anything else. You’re a mountain climber, rather than a venus fly trap, but the core gameplay feels quite similar, in that it’s a platformer where your main ‘tool’ allows you to click on a platform to propel yourself towards it, with most platforming challenges requiring quick and skilful use of your grappling hook, and most enemies differ in how they happen to interface with it. While it starts simple, it gets surprisingly involved, with later levels having individual sections longer than earlier whole levels, and with some particular setpieces being enough to give me a game over all on their own. It’s finicky, in places (which, sidenote, do not play the HTML5 version of this, literally you cannot collect extra health or lives) and perhaps a bit bare mechanically, but I’d still say this is fairly solid: if you’re looking for something to take 30-45 minutes of your time, and you don’t know anything else in this dev’s catalogue — like I had, so many years ago — you can’t really go wrong with this as a first choice. God knows it managed to hook me in.

Hot Air is a game where you use your mouse cursor as a fan to guide a hot air balloon to the end of a level. There are optional stars to collect which unlock bonus levels, but the player has to be both careful and precise, for any wall, floor, or obstacle pops the balloon in one hit, forcing the player to restart the whole level. It seems simple enough, but it’s… deceptively difficult, without much of a curve to ease the player in. While the first level mostly functions as a tutorial — only having to make sure you don’t ram yourself into the walls trying to collect the star — the second level is absolutely brutal, requiring incredibly precise timing and understanding of how the game handles momentum should the player want to beat it, let alone collect all the stars. The third level, pictured here, eases up considerably, but getting the bonus star then requires you to effectively go through the level three times without making a single mistake. With levels four and five, I was… pretty quickly humbled, and I realized that what I thought might be a quick pitstop and a gentle easing into this whole “beat every Nitrome game” project was actually going to require serious effort and time on my part if I wanted to go through with it.

…Or not. Because when I reached level six, and got immediately walled without even escaping the beginning area, I was like “okay this is ridiculous how am I meant to do this?” I looked up a video walkthrough, and then found out… I was dealing with pretty severe lag. There seems to be an issue with the emulated version I'm using where you can't fly smoothly nor can you reach your intended full speed… while obstacles, such as the rising lava in level five, or the opening and closing mouth of level six, are not bound by these same issues. This requires the player to be reflexive and precise in their movements, yet robs them of the tools to make that possible. I tried to see whether level six was still beatable despite those constraints (like level five, in particular, was) but to no avail: I just was not able to pass the first of the levels' many obstacles, let alone collect any of the stars. It's a shame, because I was genuinely enjoying the challenge up to a point, not to mention how frustrating it felt to have to give up on the very first game of the project, but I guess there's not much of an option. I actually came back to this a few months later and played it directly on Flash Player to see whether I could do it there, only to find... the exact same problem: your character for some reason moves way slower than they should, they can't build up the speed to get past obstacles. Maybe if the promised HTML5 port for this fixes that problem, I could pull the pin out of this, but, uh, given the general quality of the HTML5 ports I played I'm not especially holding out hope. I think the balloon has burst, by this point.

For a game titled after this very mechanic, it’s interesting how minor the fact that you can (theoretically) only play through OneShot the one time before it’s contents become permanently inaccessible feels, in the grand scheme of the entire experience. Perhaps it’s a leftover from its initial freeware release where merely closing the game would mean you’d (theoretically) never be able to play it again, but the two other games I know that share this idea often have it as the forefront mechanic, and one that goes line in line with the themes the game is trying to convey. While Awkwardsilencegame’s One Chance uses this core idea as a way to paint choice as irreversible and death as final, while Marcus Richert’s You Only Live Once mostly wants to poke fun and look at what would happen if platform game mechanics were applied to the real world, OneShot’s rendition of this mechanic… doesn’t even feel primary compared to the many different things it’s trying to do, and thematically… feels far more subtle about what it’s going for than other games of its ilk.

It’s… a bit difficult to talk about this game without delving into spoiler territory, but I’ll try my best. You play Niko, a cat creature who wakes up in a world far, far away from where they came from. They soon come to learn that the world they’re in has long past ended, and that they’re the only one who can hope to bring it back — sending Niko on a journey from the outer edge to the centre of the world, carrying the sun itself with them to try and fix what once was broken. Gameplay… feels typical for an RPGMaker adventure game: explore areas, solve puzzles, interact with a cast of quirky characters, but from the start it’s apparent that you’re dealing with something much more than what’s been placed in front of you, and the realms of narrative and ludonarrative aren’t so much layered but one and the same.

And it’s this level of ludonarrative — and how the game makes the player interact with the fourth wall — that provides this game with its defining strength. A lot of the stuff this game manages to pull off is unreal — especially for what’s ostensibly an RPGMaker game — and it’s super neat how these elements interact with the gameplay just as much as it does the story. Puzzles make you interact with things outside the game window just as much as within it, and there’s a real thrill to figuring out just what precisely the game is expecting you to do. It never feels gimmicky or unjustified by the narrative, either: near every time it happens it’s congruent with what’s going on in the story, and there’s a thematic throughline throughout which… I think seeks to examine the relationship between player and player character, and questioning where exactly the line between the two lies. It’s low-key, but it’s an interesting thing to think about, and even if I probably would’ve been into the meta elements regardless of how they intertwined with what was going on — mostly given how impressive it is that the game can do what it does — but having that extra layer where it almost parallels the diegetic narrative really does turn what… could’ve ended up being just a gimmick into a legitimate and strong part of the experience.

But the meta elements wouldn’t be as effective, I feel, if the writing and diegetic narrative weren’t. Luckily, they are! I’m especially fond of the character writing, and how that works in conjunction with what… honestly feels like a road trip plot in ways. Your quest is to head to the tower in the centre of the world, exploring and puzzling through each of the 3-5 major areas (depending on how you count them), and each one is filled with a bevy of fun, distinct characters that you get to interact with. You never see them again once you move on to the next area (with some exceptions), and there are generally no storylines or major arcs attached to them, but this works in the game’s favour: having people you meet, have fun with, get a little attached to, then never see again works well with this type of story and… actually kind of fits in with how you can only play the game once: you’re never going to be able to see these people again after leaving them behind just like how you (theoretically) can’t play the game again once you complete it. It’s neat, and once again even beyond anything thematic the writing works in its own right: it’s fun and the characters are distinct and likable and it does a lot to sell all the other elements of the game.

(As a sidenote to the above: I also really love Niko! There’s not much to exposit beyond how they’re super cute and how they’re really good at interfacing with the more complex elements of the plot and its themes but I think they’re one of the strongest parts of the game’s writing and I think it would be a mistake to not mention them in this review, so, like, yeah. Niko great.)

If there’s a thing I do have an issue with, it’s mostly the map design and how that interfaces with the non-meta puzzles. Unlike games of OneShot’s ilk like Ib or The Witch’s House, which typically keep to small rooms and areas — and where everything you need to get to the next room or area is right in the room you’re in — OneShot’s map is expansive, boasting large areas with landmarks far apart which you kind of need the fast-travel function if you wanna get from one end of the map to the other anytime soon. It’s a worthy experiment, and an interesting point of comparison, but in practice I feel it mostly proves why these sorts of games tend to keep things small. Areas are large enough that it’s easy to miss what you’re meant to find, and there are enough things and items to interact with located far apart that oftentimes it can be unclear what you can and are supposed to do. Maybe the problem is potentially me just being bad at adventure game puzzles but even then, I often felt like I had more of a clue on what I was doing whenever the puzzles were localized to a single room or left the game window. While it is cool, again, to see a more open world in an RPGMaker game, and while it’s cool to see conventions of genres played with or experimented on, the world exploration itself and how it futzes with the puzzle-solving aspect was one idea, in particular, I think didn’t really work in the game’s favour.

Though aside from that, I had a fun time! Again, it’s difficult to go into specific detail about what exact cool things this game does, but if you’re willing to take the game at its word you get something that… between the way its meta elements (which are super creative and fun even on their own) interface with a well written, fun diegetic narrative, you’re going to get something that sticks with you, even after everything’s done and gone. 8/10.

Before playing it again, I thought Cheese Dreams would be the first Nitrome platformer to not revolve around a core mechanic, which… was incorrect, to an extent. The core difference here, compared to games like Dirk Valentine, Twang, Dangle, etc. is that platforming is defined by what you are, as opposed to what you can do. As the moon, you’re constantly bouncing, constantly in the air, constantly moving, and learning how to manage this is key to interfacing with the many ways the game then plays with this mechanic. Buttons that reverse the direction of gravity. Cannons that’ll fling you in whatever direction you aim. Mouse wheels that you have to push either to where they can give you a boost or press down a button, or that you have to move out of the way so you can get where you need to go. The game plays mix and match, as is more than typical for a Nitrome platformer at this point, but there’s no real drip-feed: it starts off that way and then, like, introduces basically everything else in level 7. This… works, honestly. It lets the player know everything they’re gonna need to know to get through the game, and gives the game a lot more room hereafter to be experimental with the types of levels it employs. As opposed to the traditional platformer obstacle courses, some levels in Cheese Dreams are instead puzzles you need to solve, or mazes you need to find the correct way through, or, tragically, a backslide into the annoying design of Nitrome yesteryear: endurance runs where making too many mistakes sends you allllllllll the way back to the beginning, not helped here by how imprecise your bouncing can be and how the camera sometimes can obscure somewhere you might need to jump down to. That’s not a dealbreaker (and the fact that it’s only a minor issue in a couple levels rather than a slog that takes over the entire second half of the game is, uh, I guess an improvement) though that and said finnickiness with the movement/camera do stick out for the worse. I maybe wouldn’t put this in, like, the upper echelon of Nitrome games I’ve played so far, even besides that — I’m not sure it particularly stands out amongst the crop of games directly surrounding it, cute plot/set dressing aside — but it was a nice way to spend an hour or so on my day off, and, frankly, I think that in itself is a mission success.

Ooooookay so this is two-for-two where the HTML5 port has just been… straight-up inferior to just emulating it on Flash. In this case, what forced me to switch was… just straight-up horrendous framerate. I kept up at it for… the first quarter of the game? until I hit a point where the framerate impacted my ability to see what I was doing. I then switched to the Flash version, which also had some issues, though at least they… in a way kind of added to the gameplay experience? The speed (and ground traction) of my character seemed to vary wildly depending on what my graphics settings were — if they were set to high, the hedgehog would slide at mach speed off of platforms to the point where at points I straight up clipped into the walls; if they were set to low, he’d slow his roll, which sometimes helped to ease myself down an obstacle, but sometimes cause me to really need to tilt the level if I wanted him to move. It was honestly a bit of fun figuring out which graphics setting worked best for which level, even if the process of doing so once caused me to misclick and reset all my progress. It’s unintentional, but it's a degree of customizability that… honestly added a bit of an extra dimension to gameplay: figuring out what sort of control scheme I wanted for the given challenge ahead. Sadly this doesn’t… entirely preserve the game — some platforms/obstacles don’t function as intended, some later levels are just kind of awful when you’re not dealing with the intended physics/framerate, and those levels… do tank the game a bit, enough to maybe make me question whether this is one of the games I’d recommend.

Which is a shame, because for something I had no impression of going in… this is pretty solid! It plays… like a table maze except not top-down. You play by tilting the level in a circular motion, causing the little hedgehog guy within to move along, as flat surfaces become slopes, things that are vertical become horizontal, and at some points you have to flick/move very fast to fling the guy through the air. There’s a difficulty curve that does a good job of building up and testing the player’s skills, and the game drops particular obstacles in and out so that while you never forget them when they turn up again you never quite get sick of them, either. It’s also fascinating to see where elements of level design seem reminiscent of other Nitrome games, either reused from games before (there are one or two levels here that seem ported from Hot Air), or design concepts that I know get revisited in future games. There are some stinker levels, some parts of the game where you get killed before you even know what the obstacle of the level is, and… my recommendation for this one is definitely more conditional given how much the emulation fucks with some of the later levels, but aside from that… yeah, I liked this! It’s a cute little platformer with a neat mechanic which might not stick in my memory forever but was pretty nice for the time I played it. Would recommend.

Nitrome’s second endless game! And the first endless game to not go missing for three years! You play as a wizard, defending his castle by drawing sigils to pop the balloons your invaders are dropping in with. It starts simple, but like most endless games it quickly ramps up in difficulty, with invaders falling faster, and requiring more balloons to be popped before you can finally be rid of them. It’s simple, but it works, and while there are certainly some functionality issues — sometimes it thinks you drew a circle when you actually drew a V, enemies will drop in covering up other enemies which makes it much harder to see what their balloons are, one particular sigil takes longer to draw than the game will otherwise let you so you have to draw it shitty or otherwise it won’t count — it’s still fairly decent. Not something I’ll likely go back to afterwards, but I have to admit, it kept me replaying it, actively attempting to top my high score a little bit past the point where I’d otherwise gotten enough of an impression to stop, which probably means this game succeeded in what it was designed to do. I know there’s a sequel/remake/whatever the term is to this one in the far, far future of 2015, once they’d moved on to making phone games. I might check that out at some point. I’m curious to see how exactly they iterated on this, especially given the eight-year gap.