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.

Y’know, I probably would’ve added some checkpoints if my levels were marathon-length slogs with constant one-hit-kill obstacles that supersede the lives system already in place, with buggy mechanics where I can be affected by, say, an enemy blowing wind when I’m not even on the same plane as them, borked controls where I can literally be clicking the bottom of the screen and my spider will still move upwards into an enemy, constant leaps-of-faith where I need to know what’s ahead to make the best decision, and level design where I’m constantly fighting against the game to move forward, but I guess also “if you hit an instant death trap because you were trying to play with the physics in a physics platformer you have to go back to square one” doesn’t really seem like that big a deal compared to everything else. It starts off okay, and relatively simple, even if some of the more technical things are evident immediately, but once things feel a need to get more involved and complex it gets intolerable real quick. I spent, like, half an hour on the first nine levels, found a couple of them to be straining but otherwise bearable, then level ten took like, a whole 40 minutes of making it several minutes in, dealing with all the fiddly stuff, then hitting a one-hit kill or accidentally moving backwards into an enemy. I thought, maybe, like, this was just a low point and that the game would become better once it got all that out of its system. It didn’t. I found out level 11 was even more of that shit and decided, maybe, this wasn’t worth my time. Cowardice, I know, but having beat my head against the wall for 40 minutes only to find that there were more walls made me figure that I’d gotten enough of an impression. I looked at playthroughs of the remaining levels and even watching them felt too tedious for me to wanna stick around to the end.

This was a nice and cute way to spend three hours on a weekend. It's... effectively your average VN in terms of gameplay — make choices that change the ensuing dialogue slightly and ultimately determine which of the two endings you get, but as a short game that works well enough and the presentation/artstyle is gorgeous enough to kinda make you forgive/forget the more simple design compared to Yangyang's previous efforts. The story's also nice — I really like the use of dual perspectives between friends-turned-enemies Marion and Audrey: it helps give both of them separate arcs and subplots and makes the issues/differences between them grey enough that you're rooting for the two to overcome them and get back together again. There's... small issues — the worldbuilding/magic system is wayyyyyyy too complex for what is a three hour game which left me with too little info about certain things (what's the stigma against healers? why specifically would it be a problem if Audrey wants to be a healer?) and some of the choices listed aren't exactly indicative of what they actually mean, but those are mostly small gripes. It's ultimately a really nice little coming-of-age story which while maybe not being enough to reach the level of something like The Letter is still absolutely worth your time if you ever happen to get it. 7/10.

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.

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.

The first Nitrome game so far to be a mostly smooth experience! Or, well, as smooth as this game can be. Chick Flick is a game where little birds fall from the sky, and it’s up to you to move a trampoline across the ground to bounce them back up into the nest. Taking too long to help one bird will create more birds you have to deal with, and there are a bunch of random variables, such as different types of birds falling from the sky, and different stage hazards which you have to play around. This game is… finicky, and often feels more based on luck than precision. You never quite have the fine control to really bounce anything in a specific direction, and a lot of the stage hazards in later stages make figuring out what the prime position to be in is even harder. Most of the different birds or said stage hazards are explicitly handicaps you have to power through (like egg birds, who you literally cannot get into the nest before another bird spawns in) as opposed to conundrums you can work around, and you never know when or where another bird will drop in. And if you’re on one side of the screen, and a bird drops in on another, there’s literally nothing you can do: the bird hits the ground and you lose a life before you can race across and catch it. There are positives: the music’s nice, the final stage’s gimmick is clever in how it can both hinder and help you depending on application, and it does feel good when you’re able to line everything up and get a shot into the hoop, but as a whole… with how finicky everything feels and with how winning is more you getting lucky more than you being able to strategize around the random elements this game… honestly felt more annoying to play than anything.

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.

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.

So this was kinda stupid but it was also pretty fun? The short of it is that this is an on-rail zombie shooter kinda like House of the Dead but done entirely in FMV. You're in a jeep, travelling horizontally across a landscape, shooting zombies that are layered very poorly over the background. You basically keep going on the same route towards a fortress four separate times in an attempt to defeat Dr. HELLMAN, broken up by optional sidequests and cutscenes where this rasta guy and this Generic Girl talk to you about how cool you are. It's... not exactly a great gameplay loop by any means — the first 90% of the game is literally just doing the same levels over and over again — but I won't lie, it was kinda fun to shoot zombies and the cutscenes are exactly the right kind of 90s cheese — the actor who plays Winston deserves props for being so consistently entertaining the whole way. I don't exactly feel like there's much reason to play it again, but... it was a nice distraction for 80 minutes and that's all it really needed to be. 6/10.

INSIDE starts with you playing as a small child running through a forest, pursued by gunmen, vans, and guard dogs. His flight takes him through several different areas — a farm, a steelworks, and a dilapidated city — and as the player platforms and solves puzzles to get through each area, they eventually find themselves delving into a research institute, which is, seemingly, the source of everything that’s happening. It’s difficult to really talk about the plot of INSIDE. Not because of any major spoilers (though, admittedly, there’s a pretty big one) more so because… the plot is your interpretation of it. Not necessarily just in terms of thematic content — though that’s a big part — you loosely have to intuit what’s going on around you, and then… bring your own perspective into it. Figure out your own meaning out of the puzzle pieces laid out in front of you.

Of course, it’s very easy for this particular approach to fall flat. For something, say, to make an attempt at looking evocative, or “artsy,” but for that to be a front for a work that turns out to be more vacuous in nature. That’s subjective, of course, and dependent on the thoughts and tastes of whatever given audience member is the one staring at the painting. I, personally, am of the viewpoint (or, well, the uni teachings) that everything has something behind the surface, however intended by the author, however much you need to squint your eyes to see it. It’s not a viewpoint I exercise often. As somebody who’d say he’s… more of a creative than he really is a critic, oftentimes when I look at a piece of media I pick more at the skull than I do the brain: my focus is on the construction of a work, what specific choices the author made and how that could be applied to my own creative pursuits. It usually takes a work (or something outside of it) specifically prompting me to delve into the thematic side of the equation. INSIDE is a game that asks the player to look at it with that sort of lens. And, luckily for it, I think it succeeds on that front.

What helps, though, is that even if it didn’t, it’s still a pretty solid puzzle platformer on its own. It’s a bit more of the former than the latter, in that making forward progress is more about figuring out what to do over executing it, and I think that’s a formula that works. When you’re at a wall, or a chokepoint, all the pieces you need to make it past are right in front of you, and it’s mostly a matter of figuring out what the pieces are and where to place them. There are some really neat sequences — like the whole level taking place in the mines: how the whole area feels like one single giant puzzle that you slowly start to solve the more and more you gather the things you need — and some moments where you have to think outside the box to figure out your way past an obstacle. The artstyle is impressive, too: I love the use of 3D backgrounds and models for what is functionally a 2D sidescroller, and I’m a fan of how the game makes work of darker more muted colours like blacks and greys to still paint rather vivid and pretty landscapes. Most of all…

I really love the animation work. The way movement is depicted works to detail a lot of little things that help characterize the experience. Your character runs with a gait that… isn’t remotely smooth: there’s way too much needless extra movement and expenditure of energy whenever he runs. He flails and has his body completely taken by the air whenever he falls. He buckles when he hits the ground, and it takes a second for him to truly get back on his feet again. These aren’t the movements of anybody who has… any sort of finesse or knowledge on how to properly run and jump: this is a scared kid, on the run, up against a world that is all too happy to kill him on sight. Speaking of, the death animations feel genuinely brutal: the way you can see your blood splattering on the ground when the dogs rip your throat out, how everything becomes a mess of limbs and hair when a certain underwater creature grabs you, or how when you fall from too high you think, for a moment, that you’re right about to get back up, and then you don’t. Not to mention basically… a lot of the stuff that happens during the final act of the game, which looks and feels so gross not just by what’s in front of you, but through some of the little ways in which things move around there. In general, I really like the way things move in this game: it works both to characterize the situation and makes it feel a good bit more evocative.

I do think the experience could’ve been a bit more concise? It’s perhaps an odd complaint, given that the game’s only roughly 3.5 hours long, but I felt like you could maybe shave 30-45 minutes off that and have… a bit of a more focused experience. Some of the sections, I felt, felt… maybe extraneous: parts where it felt like the game was retreading old ground, or otherwise not really going anywhere new. I think maybe the road to the final act could’ve also been shorter: there’s a point where you think that it’s going to transition to the climax but then it keeps going for a good while longer before you reach it. While puzzles are mostly fairly intuitive, sometimes executing what you need to do feels a bit more tight than it should. This gets a bit rougher near the end, where oftentimes it seems like you know what you need to do… only for there to actually be an extra step involved, and sometimes it feels less like you’re missing one of the pieces and more like you’re just not doing it right.

But aside from those quibbles, I enjoyed my time with INSIDE. It’s a solid sidescroller that gives you challenges on multiple fronts — both in terms of the puzzles you need to solve to progress, and the work you kind of have to put in to understand what’s going on. I wouldn’t necessarily place it close to a game I super enjoyed, or anything: the length really does kill it, a little, and even then sometimes there’s only really so much an artsy platformer can really do to get more than a 👍/10 from me, but I liked this, it left an impression on me, and I think, maybe, this'll be something that I'll keep thinking about a good bit down the line. 7/10.

I don’t play many FPSes. Not because of any particular dislike of the genre, or anything like that, more that… I think I’m just generally not predisposed to really go and check them out? I think mostly because my formative memories of gaming were with games often decried by the Call of Duty bros in my cohort as kiddie shit which I needed to grow up so I could play Real Games, and mostly due to most FPSes I heard of at the time being war shooters where the #1 selling point was usually ‘better graphics! it looks so good! by the way your computer won’t be able to run it and also even if you got a better one you won’t be able to run the next one we churn out in a year or so!’ that I was kinda turned off and kept playing the things I preferred to play.

Even today, I don’t really tend to stray into the genre much, even if I don’t exactly feel how I felt about the genre back then. Maybe I’m still subconsciously biased. Maybe it’s because most shooters today are still focused on multiplayer and I’m mostly a single-player kind of guy. Maybe it’s because I’m honestly kinda bad with shooter games — I’m too slow on the draw/too focused on getting a perfect shot in a genre that mostly encourages more fast-paced play, and I’m too tunnel-vision-y/head-empty to try and go for cover/do anything other than stand there and attempt to rush down people. There are FPSes I’ve tried, and liked, over the past few years, but as a whole, the genre is kind of a blind spot for me. I haven’t really played many of the must-play shooters, and as a whole… none of those that I’ve played have really been formative experiences or anything I’d place among my favourites.

Except for this one! This was something I picked up in one of the early Humble Bundles that I bought, and started playing… on my birthday, apparently, in 2014, and… kind of immediately I was captivated. Through the frenetic and at times absolutely brutal gunplay, the simultaneous power trip and achilles heel of your darkness power, a penchant for violence that actually sickened me at the time (which, from the perspective of nine years later: lol), and… enough little touches and moments that got me genuinely into the story. I never played the first game, or read the comics, nor did I particularly care to, but this game, in particular, was one that held into my memory long after I beat it, and was always in my mind as ‘hey I should replay this someday’ for a lonnnnngggggg time coming. I finally got the chance, in early 2023, and having replayed it again… and honestly? I think it still holds up.

You play as Jackie Esticato, the newly appointed don of the Esticato crime family, who has the dubious honour of being the current bearer to The Darkness — a primordial being that jumps from host to host, granting them great power at the cost of eventually driving them insane. Jackie has been able to suppress it for many years, but a hit both forces him to tap into The Darkness again and places him face to face against The Brotherhood, a mysterious cult who intend on taking The Darkness from Jackie and using it from their own ends. In the midst of it all, Jackie keeps getting visions of his past, and of his late flame Jenny, and it soon becomes a battle on multiple fronts: one against The Brotherhood for control of The Darkness, and one against The Darkness for control over himself.

The shooter gameplay, at its core, isn’t too different from what I’ve otherwise seen, though I appreciate the arcadey edge added to it — instead of holding the same guns all game and collecting ammo for them, you can only hold two guns at a time, and you’re encouraged to frequently switch with guns on the floor, often meaning that you never quite know what you’re going to have during the next encounter. What really diversifies gameplay, however, is the presence of The Darkness. Manifesting as two tentacles bursting out of your body, The Darkness immediately makes you a force to be reckoned with, and against the legions of gangsters and cultists fully justifies the ‘one man army’ approach most shooters tend to take with their protagonists. Slashes from your tentacles stun enemies and demolish whatever armour they might have, and if you grab an enemy while they're stunned, you get to pick and choose just how, exactly, you get to tear their body apart. You eat hearts to regain your health. You can grab parts of the environment, like pipes, or car doors, or fans, fling them right at enemies, and if your aim is right you just cut them in half — with bonus upgrade points given for killing people in special ways. These upgrade points (even if the tree itself looks fuckin’ ugly), amongst other things like different executions, then feed into and make your guns stronger: whether it just being straight upgrades, or powers like Swarm — which makes you barf locusts on your enemies from long range and making them unable to fire back — or gun channelling, which lets you temporarily boost your guns, increasing their power and allowing you to hit enemies through walls and armour. With the power of The Darkness, you can walk into a room full of gunmen and make mincemeat of them in a way that doesn’t even feel close, and this feeling of sheer power is an adrenaline rush, each enemy encounter a hit that asks the player how exactly they are going to fuck shit up — in the way that reinforces the idea the story presents of The Darkness as a well of power easy to become addicted to.

But it’s not always a stomp in your favour: specific encounters instead make your Darkness powers a liability instead of a godsend, and relying on them exclusively is a surefire way to get Jackie gunned down. Beyond the lack of range your tentacles have outside of objects you can pick up — functioning more as melee/the coup de grace while your guns pepper enemies from afar — the Darkness possesses one incredibly crippling weakness: light. In addition to just absolutely blinding you whenever you’re in it, you lose access to your darkness powers and your passive health regeneration, leaving you blind, vulnerable to whatever comes your way, and absolutely helpless against it. This makes positioning vitally important in each encounter — finding a place outside of the light where you can jump in and out of the action, looking out for lights and generators to take out so you can run in for the kill. The lights are also used in a way that forms a difficulty curve: early on, when you’re fighting other gangsters, most light is incidental, and oftentimes is easily shot out, but once the game progresses, and you start going up against the brotherhood, light is actively weaponized against you — enemies with giant spotlights, generator setups which bathe the room in light, and oftentimes your first step in these encounters is to figure out how to take out the lights so you can properly fight. There’s one late game area set in a carnival which is just chokepoint after chokepoint of you walking to a spot, hitting a wall, and you needing to use all the tools at your disposal to eventually wear it down — and another one where it’s flat out daylight and you’re in an open room with barely any cover and you just have to keep moving, dodging bullets and taking out enemies while having to avoid the bad spots on the floor. I like the light both as a way to ramp up the difficulty and as a way to reinforce story beats, and sell The Brotherhood as people who know The Darkness and know how to take it down, as opposed to the random gangsters who don’t know what they’re up against and only particularly have numbers on their side. In general I just… really love how The Darkness manages to shake up the gameplay — it would’ve been easy to just give you powers and let you just style on your enemies, but the drawbacks and considerations you increasingly have to grapple with just really manages to bring it to another level.

And even if I think it’s the story that maybe knocks the game down a little, I do appreciate a good deal of what it does. The dialogue draws from the best of its 90s comics influence, having a little bit of edge without drowning every line with it/making all the characters feel homogenous, and the voice acting does a lot to elevate the material (HE WAS THE FIRST MAN TO EVER NOT EXIST is a line that’ll stick in my head forever). There’s also… something I won’t spoil, that occurs throughout the game, and even if the impact was lost on me this second go around knowing where it all goes I respect what it’s trying to do and I respect it for at least making me question what’s going on. What really was a misfire are the hub sections, set in Jackie’s penthouse apartment. I like the important conversations there, but… the game really kind of grinds to a halt as you walk around and are encouraged to like 10 other unimportant background gangsters and there really isn’t much to do. I’ve seen other shooters do this sort of thing before, and better — mainly through lowering the size and adding things to do, like sidequests and optional challenges — but here… it’s too large and too long for what’s mostly people expositing things at you, and having to drudge through it between nearly every story beat got old kinda quickly.

And… that’s enough of a mark to maybe weigh it down and prevent it from being one of my absolute favourites, the game still left as much of an impact on me now as it did back then. From fast, frenetic, and at times brutal shooter gameplay, a core mechanic that cripples you as much as it makes you a force to be reckoned with, a story that does a good job taking risks even if it doesn’t work as well a second time to an artstyle tha- oh man I didn’t even mention how cool this game looks, I love the way the cel-shading makes the game look legitimately out of a comic book — this is still… probably my favourite shooter. Maybe one day I’ll play more of them. 9/10.

The other Nitrome game inspired by Lemmings! Unlike Sandman, though, you instead use your mouse to physically draw on the level, providing ways for your Lemmings to make it through the level, both directly — drawing lines to act as platforms to get them across a gap, or walls to change their direction — or by using it to influence something in the level: drawing a wall within an enemy to cut it in half, or turning the line you draw into a makeshift fuse to blow up a bomb. Each new obstacle brings a new way for the player to interface with the draw tool, and the game does a great job at mixing and matching all these different elements: never letting anything drop by the wayside, never making any given obstacle feel overdone. Combine that with level design which at times feels both frenetic and cerebral, a genuinely cute artstyle, and with some truly banger music, I genuinely think this game’s super charming. There are… issues, of course — there are some real finicky hitboxes, and one of the core mechanics where your lemmings must reach several different exit flags (and your progression through the game is gated behind a certain number of lemmings hitting the flag) seems to… straight up not work: so long as you get one little guy to an end flag, it seems like the game lets you through no matter what. They’re minor things, though, and in the case of the second one it just seems to make the game more friendly: if you’re willing to try to forgive some 17-year-old-flash-game jank, and you’re down for an experience that’s… more meaty than any of the other Nitrome made before this, I recommend it! Definitely my favourite of their 2006 output.

The most competent of the four Jeff The Killer RPG Maker fangames I played. By that merit, it’s also the least interesting. This is a sequel to I S O L A T I O N, and is… at least completable, this time? There’s not as many closets you have to look through, but that doesn’t mean the level design hasn’t stopped being “either pick the arbitrarily correct option or get instakill jumpscared” — it’s just now that instead of closets it’s two branching paths, different rooms, etc. In general this one doesn’t feel particularly notable: while the beginning conversation with “Lile” and her parents is entertaining, most of the dialogue afterwards just describes things in the room, the story itself taking a backseat right until you choose an ending by picking a random door. Some of the more… ‘notable’ beats feel directly copied from the previous game. Puzzle design is frustrating: there's no real indication of where to go, how to follow up on something you just did, or even what doors/rooms actually mean anything and which are set dressing. It’s more competently made, that’s for sure — no softlocks, no weird broken mechanics that make the game much harder than it should be — but… given that it’s not particularly noteworthy or amazing otherwise, I can’t really say that’s to its benefit. 2/10.

I heard that when Resident Evil effectively codified the survival horror genre a lot of its flaws became deliberate inclusions because those limitations were what made RE's atmosphere and gameplay so memorably scary.

And if that doesn't work as a lead-in for Song of Horror I don't know what would. The game has so many ideas that make me go "why" at their inclusion but fuck me if they don't fulfil their purpose of making the game feel legitimately stressful to play. Like, for example, I don't exactly think "maze with walls you can only see via still, oddly angled images right at the beginning of the gauntlet and also if you touch the walls three times you're permakilled" is exactly fair or fun, but it's certainly scary in a way that goes beyond just the story or presentation of the game. If something bad gets included as a method of successfully achieving what the game wants to achieve, does that make that inclusion good, ultimately?

What helps make considering this game a whole lot less complicated, though, is that it's largely pretty good otherwise. The game goes like this: you are trying to solve the mystery of a being hunting you down called 'The Presence,' and trying to find traces of those who have previously encountered it. You and your group of closest confidants and also random people who stumble onto the scene must head into an archetypal horror environment, solve puzzles and achieve your objectives fixed-camera-survival-horror style all while The Presence hunts you down and makes you play minigames, lest the character you play as get killed forever. In this vein, the core gameplay really works. Environments are large and explorable but condensed enough that it's unlikely that you'll find yourself lost or in a room that doesn't serve a greater purpose. The many characters you can choose from are distinct in how they react to the environment — while I really think there could've been room for divergence for how the level changes based on the character you play (why does Erika, for example, need to get the components for a puzzle box which she then needs to solve to get the keys for her own apartment), the differing motivations and reactions of each character give a bit of value to going through episodes multiple times. The minigames themselves really help add tension even to otherwise quiet segments, as the fact that they're effectively randomly deployed means that you're never sure whether you're safe or what's going to happen just around the corner.

There are unconditional problems though, too. Episode 2 as a whole really brings the whole game down. While all the other levels have simple, one-word descriptions which tell you exactly what they are and are good prompts for puzzles endemic to those sorts of biomes, Episode 2 is... an antique shop which is connected to a series of apartments which is also connected to a storage facility which is a fucking labyrinth, and I think that lack of identity really leads into its problems: its more generic puzzles, the huge amount of areas and things that don't do anything and the horrid storage maze that functions as the climax. The game also doesn't do a great job at tutorializing certain mechanics: the stats that define each character never get explained at all (I still don't know what "Stealth" does) and the tutorials the game gives really do not do a good job of indicating what the player has to do — I almost failed the breathing minigame the first time because of this and I never really figured out how exactly the door minigame was actually supposed to work. The jank definitely does contribute to the atmosphere, but I did get frustrated from dying/nearly dying from things I felt could've been avoidable had the game taught me better.

Ultimately, though, the game is complicated... but also good, I think. It falls wayyyyyy short of 'great' given how as a game a lot of its mechanics and setpieces set out to frustrate the player, but as a horror experience, I can't deny that it worked exactly as intended. 7/10. If you wanna try it out for yourself I'm reasonably sure Episode 1 is out there for free so, like, check it out. At the very least, you won't regret it.