I’ve often felt with horror games structured like this — where you must go through all of the bad endings before you’re able to get the ‘true ending’ — often reached a point where you were better off just watching a YouTube playthrough than going through it, as oftentimes the brief bits of new content weren’t really worth trudging through all the other stuff you’d seen in all the playthroughs before. This game… actually wears that aspect mostly well — both because loops are only, like, fifteen minutes at their longest, and because the game lets you skip most of the tedium and takes you to where you need to go fairly quickly (in a way that feels totally diegetic!). This brings the focus to what really matters: a narrative that’s fun to go through and uncover, both on its own terms and because it lets you take in more of the game’s absolutely incredible pixel art along the way. I knock it down a bit because it did still feel like a bit of a grind going through everything even with the concessions made, but otherwise this is a super neat little RPGMaker horror. And it’s free, as well! 8/10.

So I’ve… never actually watched Pocahontas. I’m not really sure if that’s a shock or a surprise or whatever — most of my formative kids films were ones released in the early 2000s — though from what I’ve heard I didn’t particularly miss much. I could be wrong (I don’t like making value judgements on things I haven’t fully experienced) but most criticisms seem to centre around how it both-sides the colonization and genocide of the native people by simplifying the entire conflict into 'we should learn to get along despite our differences'. While I can’t claim to know much about the history of America’s colonization, being Australian, I do happen to know what the settlers did to our indigenous people, and… yeah, no, simplifying invasion and genocide like that is… at best irresponsible — this is history, and to provide a (literally) whitewashed and distorted view of it for public consumption erases the narrative of what really happened all in favour of commodifying and appropriating it in a way that lets anyone who benefited by the suffering of the Indigenous people ignore the implications of what provided the building blocks of where they live.

But I guess, ultimately, I’m actually talking about the video game adaptation, and while its attempt to communicate and rush through the movie’s plot provides a hilarious attempt at trying to convey the same themes, this is still a game that’s more about how it plays than what it’s about.

You play both as Pocahontas and her raccoon friend Meeko, who must use each other’s special abilities in order to navigate their way through the level. It feels… mostly like a puzzle platformer at times, and while you have to fight enemies and make precise jumps, emphasis is placed more on figuring out how you’re meant to get forward over either of the other two things. Across the game’s four levels are animals that want Pocahontas to help or challenge them, and through taking them on you’re able to gain abilities that upgrade your capabilities — letting you swim, run faster, shoot a projectile, etc. — which then allow you to pass obstacles you previously couldn’t break through. Along the way the game tries to explain the plot of the movie through text dumps and cutscenes, even doing its best to recreate what I presume to be sequences from the movie, which is… valiant, but rather clunky in execution, coming off as goofy imitations more than really recreating… whatever the original scene was meant to get across.

Still, as a puzzle platformer, it’s mostly solid, and there are sections that I positively vibed with — the puzzles are simple, but fun to solve, and the last level is one where you use all your abilities in a mad dash to beat a time limit which… mostly works as a platform challenge and works to bring the game full circle. I like the way the game uses Meeko to illustrate your capabilities: initially, without any of your animal abilities, you’re reliant on Meeko to clear a path for you, and Meeko is reliant on you to get him to where he can’t quite jump. As the game progresses, and you get more abilities, the balance shifts where you primarily have to get Meeko around, to where Meeko is only used for extra little challenges for collectables, to the point where in the final level you don’t control Meeko at all, which is a neat way to communicate Pocahontas’s growth. Sadly, though, the game controls… rather clunkily. Everything feels so rigid. Jumping is kind of delicate and it’s easy to over or undershoot given how jump length is tied to how fast you’re running beforehand. Death from either a bottomless pit or an enemy is instant and with no opportunity to get out of it, and it’s entirely possible to jump, fall, and when you land find out that there’s a settler right in front of you and you’re close enough to the point where the game locks you out of doing anything about it. I also felt left in the dark regarding mechanics and how certain things worked, but I’m assuming that’s more on the method I played it — presumably there was an instruction manual with this game originally that I can’t access playing it emulated.

Still, it’s decent. Nothing particularly to write home about, but it was an okay way to spend a couple hours, and while some of the platforming hasn’t aged well the artstyle has — with some insanely detailed sprites and backgrounds and some rather pretty environments. Ultimately… I won’t lie, I’m probably going to forget I played this game after a couple of months, aside from its connection to the work it’s adapted from, but for a licensed game you could certainly do much worse. 6/10.

This… felt fairly run-of-the-mill. It’s one of those ‘job simulator’ sort of games, where the horror comes as something slowly creeping into your status quo, and it… sure does hit the exact same beats I’ve seen in games like these before. It’s hard to really remember much about it, in all honesty: it does all the things you’d expect a game like this to do but it doesn’t particularly have the creativity or style to make those things seem fun or unique or interesting. Most of what comes to mind were the gameplay frustrations — the trek to the titular convenience store every night where nothing ever happens, the puzzles/gameplay sections which just felt kinda finicky and annoying, how a lot of the game is just waiting for the next thing to happen so you can wait for the next thing to happen. Perhaps if it was shorter, and maybe got to the point a little quicker, I’d be more willing to vibe with it, but as is… there are other games out there that do everything this game is going for but better. 5/10.

I think when Retsupurae covered this the guy playing the game for them put it best when he said “AKA: Super Creep Boy.”

Because maaaaaaaan this game isn’t good. It’s legitimately wholesale a ripoff of this flash game called The Company of Myself down to plot structure, narrative framing, and even the main core mechanic but while Company of Myself is a really clever little thing that has enough to be able to give you a little bit of impact, Broken Dreams is… not that. The sprite art is ugly and clashes both with the probably-free-on-backgroundpngs.com backgrounds and the platform environments — you can loosely tell they had to quickly change the sprites for the steam release since previously they were just stolen Maplestory sprites. The gameplay takes the base idea of controlling your former selves from Company of Myself and reduces it to “go to space and deploy shadow person. reset and wait for shadow person to move to space. go to next space and deploy shadow person.” in such an unimaginative way that going through the puzzles is just simultaneously braindead and absolutely tedious. The story… thinks “boy meets girl. boy loses girl. boy tries to get the girl back” is a lot more grandiose than it is, and between the goofy way it has to intermingle explaining gameplay mechanics with telling the story and how absolutely creepy the boy comes off (“I used WASD to control her and she did everything I liked. It was so unreal.”) the plot gets twisted into, like, the story of this incel who inexplicably has shadow clones trying to get back the girl he abandoned and who we’re supposed to root for and, like, man, nothing in this game works. It gets a bonus point for being mercifully short and the way it ends being absolutely perfect (if very likely unintentionally so — it’s probably meant to break the player's heart or something but lmao, no, this guy deserves it) but otherwise… yeah. Just watch the Retsupurae video instead. 2/10.

So when this game was originally announced I'll confess that I wasn't exactly all that enthused. I wasn't actually against the artstyle like some of my friends were, but... tbh the idea of Sinnoh remakes never appealed to me at all and nothing announced really made me think they were actually doing more than just remaking Pokémon Diamond and Pearl. Given that... basically nothing was revealed about the games in the months up to release, I was pretty content with skipping this game on initial release and kinda waiting out to see whether it was actually good or not. The reception was loosely positive, with a specific talking point being "this is really good if you've never played the originals and want to experience Sinnoh for the first time," so I decided I'd shell out and see just what this region had to offer.

Turns out: Sinnoh sucks ass! And, from what I understand, the remakes didn't do a lot to really fix its core issues.

I'll start with the positives because, for all I soured on it, the game left a pretty great first impression. First off: the game is absolutely gorgeous. I eventually grew to really adore the chibi models and the general artstyle/colouring was consistently really appealing — a good amount of locales/backgrounds looked stunning and the 3D models for the Pokémon felt somewhat stylized in a way that they've never really looked before. The modernization of old DS-era quirks also provided consistently nice touches: I felt surprisingly really nostalgic for the top town, grid-based movement of old and felt the way they did trainer interjections in important battles to be sufficiently cinematic (even if so many of them are "you haven't won yet! I've still got a trick up my sleeve loses literally the next turn). In terms of graphics and presentation, this is honestly probably one of the prettiest games on the Switch.

In regards to how it plays... look, it's a Pokémon game, you kinda know how it goes by now, though initially I was having a lot of fun mainly because the ante got upped a little bit — changes were made to important battles mostly to make these boss fights a lot trickier. As someone who didn't white out in Sword right up until the final fight, suddenly getting wiped by Roark's last Pokemon really took me off guard and forced me to come up with a strategy I never thought I would need to use otherwise. The Elite Four and the Champion, as an extension to this, actively make use of stuff like held items and synergies which turn them into really tricky final fights — at more than one point their last Pokémon would just start sweeping my team and it took a surprising amount of effort just to take them down before they fully completed the comeback. The Pokémon gameplay loop, IMO, is at its strongest when it expects the player to earn their victories, and the very beginning and the very end of this game really did a lot to satisfy me in that vein.

Sure is a pity the rest of the game is piss-easy, though.

It all comes down to one "innovation" made in gen-8: the always-on EXP share. The fact that all Pokémon in your team will gain EXP from every single battle means that you will very rapidly exceed the difficulty curve, very quickly. Even when I never fought wild Pokémon across the entire game, even when I actively skipped whole routes and gyms worth of trainer battles, I was still way above the levels of nearly everything right up until the end. In addition to basically guaranteeing that battles generally never challenged me at all, it also made training new mons for the team a really insufferable experience: given the rate at which mons on the bench gain EXP compared to those who are active you have to put anything you want to get to the level of the rest of the team through basically hundreds of battles until they're with the rest of the party. I was basically never able to use half my team for nearly the whole game because the other half always ended up at a lower level so I had to train them up and it just made for a miserable experience.

Which is compounded by just... how weak regular trainers are. Nine times out of ten, I'd walk into a battle, and then I'd basically just press the same button over and over again to win it because trainers in this game just throw three of the exact same, typically unevolved Pokémon that a trainer earlier on in the route already did. Trainers are complete pushovers because of this, and generally it's a self-imposed challenge to just get to the next bed or city before the mon you're trying level up runs out of PP for all their moves. It got to the point wherein the late-game, when the game just outright starts spamming Team Galactic goons at you that I was legitimately not paying any attention to the game and just pressing the A button to win battles over and over again and, like, yeah I get Pokemon is a kids game, but give me something, y'know? Break the monotony. Make traversing Sinnoh less of an absolute pain.

Because believe me, trainers having absolutely no diversity is just a symptom of how boring Sinnoh is as a region. Every route you just encounter the same 2-3 wild Pokémon. There's the chance of maybe something new if you run around in the grass for ten minutes, but more often than not you'll just be seeing Bibarels and Roselias and Geodudes over and over again because as it turns out, Sinnoh has absolutely no unique biomes. You just walk through beaches and fields over and over again with the token ice area and a (completely optional) swamp. It's near impossible to find representation of certain types if you're picky — Sinnoh having no fire types is a meme for a reason (even if the underground fixes that) but even beyond that, hey, if you want a grass type that isn't Turtwig or Roselia? Either settle for Cherrim/Wormadam, wait several real-time days for the hope you hit that 10% Carnivine spawn, or wait nearly the entire game to get to the ice area and catch Snover. Even the big catch of the region — a massive mountain that supposedly connects the whole island together — doesn't really do anything because there's no actual connectivity at all: it's just a series of generic cave levels under the same banner that look like they're one dungeon but aren't. Legitimately, I'd call Sinnoh pretty easily the worst region: even stuff like Hoenn or Johto have fun biomes/a unique aesthetic. This has nothing.

And I could bear that if the story/the journey was anything interesting, but... it isn't. This is a Pokemon game where you're fully just going through the motions of going through routes and collecting gym badges and they don't even try to make it more interesting than that. Gym Leaders (aside from some exceptions and inspired designs) are just obstacles with barely any personality who you forget about the moment you walk out of the gym. Your rival's much the same. Team Galactic is much the same. There's no real... story beyond "go to this place, fight gym leader, occasionally suffer through 500000000 Team Galactic fights," and... when the novelty of the journey in itself was already used up for the original games, you need something more to actually interest me and that's... not here.

So overall... god, this was not great. I love the aesthetic, I love the little bits of challenge that were actually there and supposedly now that I'm in the post-game things open up a lot more with rematches and The Underground (which I found to be actually kinda fun and gamey, though you kinda run out of things to do down there quick if you don't want to fight/catch wild pokemon) but when the journey was basically an exercise of going through the motions... I'm not really interested in seeing what bounties I find at the destination. 5/10.

I won’t lie that 30 minute long story games where the player goes through the same things in a daily loop… aren’t exactly new or novel but this one was fairly decently executed. I think the pixelated artstyle is fairly pretty and helps show off fairly decent design on the more-visually out there parts of the game, and this is complemented by how it only uses three colours — the addition of purple to black and white both to signify what is interactable from a gameplay perspective and to add emphasis on the more alien/horrifying aspects of the game’s setting. Story wise, I think the daily loop does well to communicate through gameplay the plot’s themes of isolation and drudgery, though I feel maybe that it went on one or two loops too long? It’s not particularly helped by how slowly the player character moves — I get that maybe that can be seen as thematic, but I do think it loosely takes a step too far and turns from deliberate emulation of the drudgery of post-apocalyptic life and kind of made me feel a bit bored while I was slowly going down the same hallway over and over again. Even then, though, it’s still fairly short, and decent, and free, and Australian, so if you happen to have half an hour to spare there are definitely worse options than this game. 6/10.

I played Paratopic roughly, like, 4-5 years before this, and the impression I had then was that there were interesting ideas hamstrung by just how… confusing and padded it was for what was only a forty-minute game. Now, replaying it 4-5 years later… my opinion hasn’t changed much. I credit it for its general artstyle and sound design (I love how grimy everything is), but… yeah I wasn’t really into much else. The conceit of the revolving protagonists is interesting, but for some reason the game actively tries to mislead you into thinking that it's just the one, and it's difficult to really tell that that's what the game's going for until near the end. Meanwhile… I can’t emphasize how padded this feels for what’s already not a long game. There are no less than three sections where you drive down an empty highway for five minutes, and when it's not doing that it's either making you walk slowly through a forest, wait for the world's slowest elevator to come down, or something else that doesn't really do much more than drag the game's runtime out. Nothing of substance really happens, and it feels like in the middle of giving the game its atmosphere the idea of attaching something more to it became second or third or fifth priority. And, admittedly, it’s a neat atmosphere… but ultimately, without much of a coherent narrative or defining idea for said atmosphere to support, this game feels… kind of vapid, more than anything. 3/10.

The first half of this was a blast. The short of it is that you're doing a virtual tour for an open house, exploring the whole place at your own pace while listening to what the virtual real estate agent has to say about the place. The mood — the writing of the agent, the use of a stock asset house, the stock piano music playing overtop — creates a pretty great image of something funny-in-a-low-effort kind of way as the game starts going weird and the horror elements start popping up. The second half is... less than amazing — there were a lot of sections where I was just kinda standing around really not sure on how to progress, and it's generally kind of hard to follow up in these slow-buildup kinds of games when you hit the peak — but the ending is absolutely hilarious and a great, brief return to form for the humour that was super present in the first half of the game. This one's only like, half an hour at most and also free so if you're interested, go check it out. Can't say much without spoiling but it's a pretty unique experience. 7/10.

I can’t quite tell whether this game was in on its own joke or not. There are parts that indicate that it is poking fun at itself, though even then I’m… not really sure that really compensates for how buggy and broken it feels to interact with anything in this game. Beyond that, too, it’s not particularly fun: it’s a walking simulator where it’s constantly really unclear where you’re supposed to go or how you’re supposed to solve the… puzzles? the game throws at you. That said, though, it’s comedy gold. From the voice acting which is just an absolute delight (real “12 year old wants to be a serious voice actor but also doesn’t want to wake up his mom” vibes) to how the idea of endless torment seems to be… being teleported to different, identical apartment buildings and forced to climb up stairs endlessly, and when they’re not directly making the game worse to play shoddy animation and graphical glitches are a sight to behold. It’s kind of the perfect game to riff on and show to other people, even if… actually playing it is a bit more painful of an experience. 2/10.

Clock Tower is a game I really want to like more than I do. You play as an orphan named Jennifer Simpson (named after the lead protagonist of the Dario Argento film Phenomena) who has just recently been adopted by a wealthy recluse named Simon Barrows. However, when the orphanage matron disappears upon attempting to summon Mr. Barrows, Jennifer’s attempts at finding her instead calls on the Scissorman, who is hell bent on hunting down and killing Jennifer and all her orphan friends. Now Jennifer must navigate the mansion, collect items, solve puzzles in order to find her friends, figure out the mystery behind the mansion, and avoid the Scissorman along the way.

When I think of this game — having actually beaten it several months before writing up this review — mostly… I feel sad, because this game was the originator for a lot of mechanics and concepts that became commonplace in horror… in addition to having just a lot of stuff that’s my jam. Things like the giallo influence, the way the narrative diverges based on what the player does, graded endings based off of what mysteries the player solves (and when they choose to end the game), confrontations where you need to hide from the monster (but don’t hide when they’re in the room with you, or else its instant death)... these are all things that’ve been copied and iterated upon by other games later down the line, but it’s neat to see all these things together, and it’s fascinating to see how these things are represented in the game that helped popularize these concepts in the first place. Combine that with a cool artstyle that manages to blend pixel art and photorealism, and a story that… really works to make use of its diverging narrative, you get a game that in some respects is just as effective and fascinating today as it was when it came out.

I just wish it was actually fun to play.

Here’s how it went down: I boot up the game, enjoy the opening cutscene, get a bit confused on what I’m supposed to do during the opening segments but mostly shrug it off as me needing to get used to the game, start heading to different parts of the house… then get informed that running is a limited resource and that I need to save it for when I start getting chased. I start walking around the house instead and… holy shit Jennifer is so slow. Like, seriously. This girl plods around the house as if her life isn’t in danger. It genuinely feels like it takes upwards of thirty seconds to walk from one end of a hallway to another, and given that this house is built out of a lot of interconnected hallways, getting from one end to another genuinely feels like it takes minutes. And given that the way puzzles are structured often places items at the opposite end of the mansion from where you use them, which creates a gameplay loop of walking very slowly to one end of the house, getting what you need there, walking very slowly to the other end of the house, using said item, checking where you need to go next, realizing the next thing you need to do was on the side of the mansion where you’d just been, sighing, then beginning the cycle all over again.

Scissorman encounters, sadly, are far too infrequent to break up this monotony — aside from the first one I got precisely two the whole game — and… maybe if I knew more hiding places it would’ve been different, but what would happen was that I’d be close to where I needed to be, he’d interrupt me, I’d run back to where the hiding place I knew was… but then that hiding place was on the other end of the mansion so when he was gone I’d have to walk very slowly back to where I was originally intending to go and holy shit actually playing this game is so miserable. It’s slow and dry and more than anything I felt bored going through the mansion. Barely anything happens and the guy meant to hunt you down never actually fucking appears and the entire experience is watching Jennifer plod along through this mansion over and over again with nothing to break it up. Maybe back when it was first released the slowness contributed to the atmosphere, but having played games from nowadays that manage to achieve that sense of looming dread, it’s clear that Clock Tower wasn’t really to veer the needle towards that balance, coming off as just... genuinely really annoying to play.

Which is a shame, because I do legitimately love what it’s going for in a lot of aspects. In terms of narrative — how what rooms you enter and what things you see diverge it, how you can effectively choose to end the story at any time and getting better results for how long you choose to stay/what specifically you unearth — it’s still absolutely fascinating and effective today and it’s really worth experiencing the game to see how it does these things… just so long as you watch somebody else do it, because actually going through it? Honestly kind of a pain! 5/10.

Man I meant to write a preamble about how this answers the question I’ve been loosely asking myself through all these horror games of “what’s my favourite survival horror?” but then when I started writing it I just ended up talking about game mechanics in a bit more detail than is really applicable for the preamble so it just turned into a paragraph of the review itself

Guess that means I’m not gonna have a preamble for this review

Oh well

Resident Evil 4 follows Leon Kennedy — one of the protagonists of Resident Evil 2 — six years after his first day as a cop placed him right at the very heart of the Raccoon City incident. Now an agent of the secret service, he now undergoes a new mission: investigate a village off the coast of Spain in hopes of finding information that can lead to the retrieval of Ashley Graham, the recently kidnapped daughter of the president of the United States. However, upon reaching the village. Leon gets attacked by inhabitants less human than he was expecting, and it soon becomes a battle for survival. With only the tools he finds — and with the help of some allies along the way — Leon now needs to shoot, stab, and solve his way through the village and related areas in an attempt to rescue Ashley, find a way out, and come face to face with some once-thought-lost faces from the Raccoon City incident.

And yeah, okay, I’m a basic bitch, here’s my favourite survival horror game. I think what ultimately makes it work so well is the way it blends its survival horror origins with its more actionized take on the formula in ways that work to enhance both. While the gameplay feels super arcadey in how you go from room to room, fighting through everything along the way — almost like a less on-rails House of the Dead — your limited resources and how overwhelming encounters tend to be means you’re on edge at every moment: cringing whenever you start running out of healing items, having ammo frequently run out on your weapons… something which then goes back to enhance the action game aspect, as the starvation of ammo then encourages the player to switch it up and use different guns in a way that helps the player to understand the strengths and drawbacks of each weapon. The game strikes a basically perfect balance between the two directions it splits off in, and I like how naturally elements of one merge with the other, such as how you tend to backtrack and come back to levels you’ve already been to solve puzzles and find a new way forward, or how the insanely tanky chainsaw guys who kill you in one hit are… enemies the player is egged on to fight given the rewards you get if you manage to actually take them down.

Beyond that, the game is just… insanely fun. It’s easy to see that this game was inspired by/born from the first Devil May Cry — you’re not exactly slashing up demons and pulling your Devil Trigger while you play as Leon, but the way the game divides itself into levels and, as aforementioned, the way you tend to backtrack and find new ways through old areas, is super reminiscent, and a lot of what made that game fun works even better here. It’s super fun to place yourself against the horde and be strong enough to take them all down, and I love how the game continuously varies and keeps things fresh. Sometimes you have multiple paths you can take, or multiple options to take care of one situation. Sometimes there are enemies in the mix who you have to radically change your approach for. Sometimes the challenge is getting through the area or solving the puzzle more than it is taking down the enemies inside. Sometimes you have Ashley who… honestly works really well as an escort NPC? It’s clear that she’s a bit of a weight on your back, and you as the player have to figure out how to keep her safe whenever a situation involves her, but… there’s a lot of effort taken to avoid the typical issues that escort NPCs have. She automatically shuffles behind you whenever you aim your gun, she’ll do her best to duck if the gun’s pointed right at her (meaning that generally if she does get shot it's mostly a case of unfortunate/poor placement of her within a room, and you can order her to stay in place or hide in a dumpster so that she isn’t as much in the way when you need to get into a big fight. Honestly, I don’t really know why Ashley’s considered, like, the poster child of annoying escort missions. By that era’s standards (and tbh even by today’s standards), she really works, both as an element that mixes up the action gameplay and something that adds to the stress of the situation.

Sadly, though, there are issues. Mainly with the boss fights. Out of the… ten or so boss encounters in the game, I could… honestly name only one who I particularly enjoyed going up against? There’s… I think two more that I thought were pretty okay, but all the other fights… lowkey kinda sucked. The big problem, I feel, is that boss HP is jacked wayyyyy too high, which results in fights that mostly just leave you running around, chipping away at the boss’ health bar, kinda getting bored because the fight’s taking way too long. Even when there’s some fun spectacle, or a unique mechanic surrounding the fight, often it only encompasses one part of the fight and as soon as it’s over you’re back to just wailing on them again. Once you start including some of the bosses with instant kill attacks, or mechanics which made doing damage to them a lot harder… yeah boss fights as a whole weren’t really winners. It says something, I feel, when the one boss I did wholly like (Verdugo) was more a matter of avoiding the boss and waiting out a timer than fighting back against it. Maybe this might’ve been a matter of the difficulty I picked (or the difficulty the game moved me to — I know there’s a mechanic like that), but as a whole boss fights felt way too tanky and sloggy to be fun, and are an unfortunate black mark over what’s…

…otherwise just a blast of an experience. I know that it’s…not exactly that unique of an opinion to put this as the best Resident Evil, or even yet the best survival horror game, but between the way the game oscillates between survival horror and third-person shooter in a way that does favours to both, and between how straight-up fun this is to play, I feel pretty confident to say I’ve found one of my favourites. At least for now. Can’t wait to see what the remake does with this. 9/10.

Faith: Chapter II works both to expand on what worked in the original game while also helping to fix some of its issues. The most notable thing, I feel, is the increase of this game’s scope — multiple large and distinct areas that all feel fresh compared to each other and never make the game wear out its welcome, even given how much longer it is than the first FAITH. The map as a whole has also been tightened — sending the player through gated paths and corridors as opposed to the rather large and open forest and house of the previous game, making it so that while sometimes I could see a puzzle and be all like ????????????? it was never a question of where I was meant to go. The strengths of the original are still here, too: the artstyle/retro aesthetic is still fantastic, and the game strikes the balance of emulating its inspirations while not going way too far with them. I knock it down a bit mostly… due to some plot stuff — for the second part of a trilogy it really doesn’t particularly go anywhere, aside from introducing some new characters — and because the enemy encounters here felt samey/not as unique as what came before (and what’s to come in chapter III), but all in all I’d consider this a step up: it keeps what made its predecessor fun and unique and yet expands in ways that make it feel brand new. 7/10.

This… took quite a bit of time to complete, on my end. I started roughly mid-September, played it for an hour before feeling low-energy and stopping, then not proceeding to play it until early October, then playing it until the first story split, then dropping it until November wherein I just kind of blitzed through nearly the entire left side of the flow chart, dropped it and didn’t pick it up until early in the new year, wherein I went through the rest of the game in the space of a couple of days. It was… a lot more sporadic of a process than usual for going through a VN (mostly due to busyness, nothing to do with the game itself) and I think that ended up hurting the game a little bit. For a mystery that focuses quite a lot on foreshadowing and micro-details, losing your memory of a lot of what happens right at the beginning does make parsing future information/figuring out the mystery harder than it’d otherwise be.

But regardless, I finished it, eventually, and… I think this is my favourite Uchikoshi game?

Well, maybe. It’s between this and Virtue’s Last Reward, and although I do love both games in semi-equal measure, I thiiiink this game gets the edge mostly because of its status as a standalone, not needing to stand within the context of a series in order to reach its full potential. You play as Special Agent Kaname Date, a detective investigating the death of his old friend Shoko Nadami. To do this, he and his police department, ABIS, utilize a top-secret interrogation technique called ‘Psyncing,’ which lets him delve into the Freud/Jungian unconscious of a character to find out what secrets lie within. In gameplay, these Psyncing segments are represented by ‘Somniums’ — adventure-game-ish segments where you look around a room, interact with objects, and break your subject’s mental locks in order to come closer to the truth of the case. Somniums often possess multiple solutions — which each reveal separate things — and through uncovering these different ways of solving the puzzle the story can split off in several ways, each branch (similar to other Uchikoshi games, like Virtue’s Last Reward) revealing different aspects of the investigation and, once you’ve turned every stone, coalescing together in the end to give you the full picture.

And I think the way you slowly work your way through the mystery is one of the game’s strongest aspects. While there’s one issue I have — a major component to the mystery that isn’t really teased or foreshadowed at all until it comes up near the end — I think Uchikoshi’s multiple-route-based, plot-heavy, solve-the-overarching-mystery style of VN really works well translated to a whodunnit like this game. The way you get answers and more questions with every little bit of story progression, the way that the plot can twist and turn and veer off onto tangents and yet still make sense with context, the way the story pretty perfectly resolves everything when even details of the mystery itself can change depending on your branch… it’s great stuff. I marathoned basically the entire final act of the game in the space of one night because I knew I had to see how everything got resolved and ultimately, in hindsight, I really don’t regret that decision. I’m pretty happy with how it all went.

And while the mystery on its own is a strong positive towards this game, I think what really made me love this game’s story was the focus on its characters. There’s a large cast of, like, 30 people in total, and while some of those characters are obviously more important than others there isn’t particularly a weak link within the main cast, which is pretty incredible on a cast that runs the spectrum on things like age, personality, sexuality, and how much the game takes them seriously. I appreciate the game’s handling of anime tropes — your main character being majorly horny is a lot better when it’s a. completely optional whether you be that or not and b. actually justified within the context of the story, and I’ve found that tsunderes are a lot more likable when they’re both your daughter and also twelve years old — but most of all I really love the way characters are defined through their relationship to Date, and by extension, you: the player. Date’s core character traits — being aloof and distant to people and unfamiliar with a lot of details regarding the world and the situation at hand yet still having a sense of humour about the world around him — are traits that are very easy for the player to insert themselves onto, and the way you can choose how Date reacts to specific things, what offhanded statements he makes, or where to go first during an investigation really hits that line between Date being his own distinct character while still having the player kinda feel the same way he does about certain things. You too can feel the same sort of frustration when you rock up to haughty, obviously corrupt-and-evil congressman So Sejima’s place for information and end up with nothing because he knows how to “you don’t have a warrant” his way out of any confrontation you want to have with him. You can go off-topic to leer at or flirt with the receptionist and you feel the eyes of everybody else in the room judge you just like Date does. It's a quiet, subtle way of making the main character an insert of the player, and I think it works really well.

And again, I love how a lot of these characters are characterized by Date’s relationship with them, and how certain facets of them are revealed just as Date begins to know them on more than a surface level. I’ve mentioned Sejima above — how Date’s inability to achieve anything every time he walks onto the Sejima estate really does a great job at selling how untouchable the guy is — but I’d really like to shout out Iris and Aiba for really showing just how well the game does with its characters. Iris — the deuteragonist for the right side of the flowchart — is on the surface an energetic and cheerful idol, but from her very first appearance she uses that exact initial appearance to pressure Date into doing exactly what she wants, which immediately works to signify that she’s a lot more relevant to the mystery than she initially seems. Aiba — an advanced AI that functions as Date’s left eye for the majority of the game — mostly functions as exposition and the main source of comic relief, but there are moments where the two of you are alone and Aiba functions as your conscience, helping Date calm down through what’s on his mind and showing that, despite being an AI, she feels things exactly the same way Date does. It’s great stuff, and just an example of how well the game writes its characters. I’m really happy that there are points when even in the middle of the investigation that the characters can just sit down and have some downtime. It really suits this game’s biggest strength.

(and also Mizuki is adorable and easily the shining star of the cast and I’m SO HAPPY that she’s the protagonist for the sequel but also I couldn’t figure out a good place to put this so)

Honestly, the game’s really easily strong enough to be considered excellent, and I’d otherwise consider it as such… but there’s one really major aspect of the game that drags it down: Somniums. The short of how Somniums work is that you’re placed in an area and you’re expected to play around with the items within it until you stumble onto the thing that works and progress. A lot of the game’s irrelevant sense of humour is on full display during these puzzle segments, and most of the alternate options, while not what let you progress, are still worth doing because they’re fun and show a bit more of Date and Aiba’s relationship. Initially, it was fun, and kind of interesting to see all the dream logic stuff, and I was down to see exactly how this core concept iterated as it went on.

How it iterated was by adding a time limit. A really restrictive time limit. One that kind of singlehandedly goes against the best aspects of the Somniums and made me dread whenever they came up.

The way it works is that every action taken inside a Somnium detracts usually at least ten seconds (though these can detract up to 30 seconds or a full minute) from a hard six-minute time limit. Certain actions award you TIMIEs, which you can use to divide/subtract how much time an action takes, but certain actions can award you negative TIMIEs, which then multiplies how much time an action takes. Somniums almost immediately become an exercise in finding the quickest route through, and when the puzzles run on dream logic and brute-forcing through options until you find the right one, this… comes at odds with itself fairly quickly. Later Somniums basically become an exercise of knowing the correct path from the start because if you happened to mess up (or, y’know, do other things so you can get an achievement/read the funny dialogue) too much there’s a point where the puzzle becomes unwinnable and you have to go back to the beginning. This means skipping through (what can be) a lot of dialogue all over again, which… even with the shorter Somniums ends up becoming super frustrating. It gets even worse when some of the later Somniums have major plot beats within. Oh, hey, you want to experience the emotional climax of one of the story arcs which heavily explores the history of these two characters and represents major character development for one of them? Do you want to go through a haunting depiction of a cognitive disorder that paints the medium and heavily recontextualizes everything you’ve thought about one of the weirder characters so far? Get ready to force yourself through the same dialogue over and over again as you realize you have to go back to the very start in order to have enough time to get through. Get ready for what was once emotionally resonant to become a complete chore. Again, maybe if the time limit wasn’t there these would’ve been a lot more fun, but by the time I was ready to push towards the end I just opened up walkthroughs for Somniums and skipped all the potential fun dialogue they could’ve had. Sucked, but it was better than having to deal with repeating stuff over and over again.

More minor, and potentially spoilery, but one thing that did disappoint me about the resolution of the mystery is that… unlike the 999 trilogy, there wasn’t any IC explanation as to why locks existed and why you needed information in order to break those locks? There’s the beginning of an explanation... but then it kinda just goes “no that’s stupid it’s obviously parallel universes” when the topic of alternate timelines was barely even brought up in the game before or afterwards. It’s mostly obvious that it’s just an OOC “you can’t go here yet,” and that it’s kinda needed so that the player doesn’t stumble into endgame revelations/the true ending immediately, but when I ran into a lock the very first route I got onto, and when one of the actual endings just very suddenly cuts off, I kind of spent the whole game wondering why exactly things were working out like that only to… not really get what I was kind of hoping for, that things just cut off because the story requires that the story cuts off at that exact moment. I think the flow chart works really well, I think it’s integral to the game’s structure and story, but when the 999 trilogy always made sure the flow chart had an IC reason for existing… it’s hard not to strike a negative comparison here.

But ultimately, I thought AI was great! The way its puzzles are executed and some quibbles with the flow chart kind of stop it from being excellent, but if you’re into Uchikoshi’s tried-and-true story structure, or if you’re looking for a crazy mystery with great, low-key character writing and an amazingly irrelevant sense of humour, then I’d say this game’s a pretty strong 8/10.

And from the best game of my Halloween marathon to… what was easily the worst. Jack is Missing is a first-person story game which is just so fucking broken. Like, there’s lag on everything you do. There’s no button prompts for anything so you kind of have to guess what you’re meant to do when you pick up an item and want to put it down. Objectives and instructions aren’t generally clear so sometimes you’re left trying to figure out what to do. Cutscenes lock your character in place so whoops, if your head was inclined down when the big jumpscare was supposed to happen then too bad, you don’t actually get to see any of it. Like, I can say that the game wasn’t really a major glitchfest… but when my assumption while playing it is that it is, and when I restart it three times because I think some non-existent signposting is actually the game glitching out and preventing me from progressing, that’s… at least a little bit of an indictment. Combine all that with a… badly written story that literally ends, like, a third of the way through and some really incomprehensible voice acting, and… man, I’m loosely generous and tend to give things the benefit of the doubt, and I wouldn’t call this as bad as other things I’ve given this score, but… I honestly cannot think of anything this game in particular does well, and when the core of this broken mess is something that… wouldn’t have been very good to begin with, I don’t think I’d be lying if I said this was one of the worst games I’ve ever played. Light 1/10.

Knee Deep is a weird fuckin’ game.

Both in concept and execution. Leans more weird on the latter than the former, though certainly I feel like you couldn’t put some of this down onto paper and act as if you’re not operating in the bizarre. My impression, going in, was that this would be a sort-of budget Life is Strange, but aside from the core concept of digging up a small town’s past in order to solve a mystery — which itself, from what I understand, is more a Twin Peaks thing — they really aren’t all that similar. If anything, the first thing I think of is Deadly Premonition. The bulk of the game involves interacting with characters who don’t quite come off like normal people and go through a mystery that steadily goes further and further off the rails the deeper in you go and it keeps an absolutely straight face about it the whole way through. As something to show to other people, be it for a stream or a game night or something, it’s a great experience. On its own… it’s a bit more complicated than that.

The game itself concerns the mystery of one Tom Cruise Tag Kern, who has seemingly hung himself while filming on-location in the town of Cyprus Knee, Miami. You play as three revolving protagonists — blogger Romana Teague (blogging, in this universe, apparently being the most important thing in the world), local reporter Jack Bellet, and private investigator K.C. Gaddis — who each investigate the events surrounding his death and dig up more than they can chew, finding questions about the Scientology Church of Us agents stationed in the city, the city’s councils plan to drain the swamp, and whether the suicide of Tom Cruise Tag Kern is entirely what it seems. The gameplay is fairly simple — you select dialogue options and make decisions, with these decisions then (well, theoretically) determining how characters think of you and changing the direction in which the story goes. There are a couple of (very easy to brute force) puzzles but otherwise there are no, like, adventure game segments where you walk around or anything: the onus is entirely on dialogue and choices and through this, the story that you begin to unfold across all three episodes/acts of this “swamp noir.”

And the first thing I’d really like to compliment Knee Deep for is its aesthetic. The game is presented as if it’s a stage play, and while it always felt more like a gimmick than a fully ingrained part of the experience, I think ultimately that this artistic choice really did a lot to contribute to the overall vibe of the game. The idea is that the characters are actually actors and the town they walk around is simply just a stage, but the stage itself is so ridiculously large and unfeasible that it’s impossible to imagine what you’re seeing as a real production, which really helps contribute to the surreal, off-kilter vibe of the game. There are also a ton of little things linked in with the presentation that are neat as well: the walls of buildings will slide down to reveal what’s inside whenever a scene goes from outdoors to indoors. There’s this one NPC who seems to double for every minor “shopkeeper” role so every time a scene takes place inside a shop he has to run onto the stage to play his part. The audience will ooh and ahh at each major twist. It’s little things like that that totally sell the whole stage play thing. Later episodes try to lean into it a little too hard by introducing a greek chorus that doesn't really work that well, but the idea itself and the little things in service of that are memorable and fun and really help bring the game into its own, in terms of being a unique experience.

I also think that the interactive narrative system is designed fairly well. It falls into the same traps a lot of interactive narrative systems do — ultimately everything centralizes into the one ending because there’s only so much a writer can have the player’s choices ultimately matter — but the journey there does a pretty good job at remembering what you did and branching accordingly. This mostly comes down to the game’s main focus being on dialogue and interaction between characters, and most choices working on that small scale accordingly. NPCs will remember what in particular you say to them, and the game points out whenever a choice has influenced what someone has said, which works to make the player intrigued as to where exactly their choices have taken them. The game also does a pretty great job at having things that seem little at the time — mentions of wild animals, a person whose existence depends on a choose-your-own-backstory choice on your part — and then proceeding to give them sudden relevance later. It’s a small thing (and not expressly related to player choice) but in a game that proclaims everything can be a butterfly effect, it’s nice to see just how little things can affect the plot in major ways.

Those are where my compliments end, though. While I do think the game is well constructed in certain areas, and while I was certainly entertained from beginning to end… that was in spite of the game, rather than because of it. The main issue is that the writing is rouuuuuuuuuuugh. In a game that leans on dialogue to tell its story none of the characters talk like real people do, and while this could lean into the whole “stage play” theme, a lot of it seems unintended more than anything. Most of the characters (including some of the player characters) come off as some flavour of asshole without a lot of positive traits to them. Characters will often talk past one another and respond in ways that make no sense in conjunction with what was just said. Jokes or concepts that were funny or interesting the first time get repeated at least three times to the point where what was originally cool about it isn’t. The story absolutely loses its mind from the second chapter onwards, and while it’s entertaining, certainly, you have to trudge through two hours of bland investigation before you start getting there — the results of which preceding to stop mattering to the plot after the first act aside from setting up one or two plot threads.

Perhaps the character most emblematic of the problems with the game’s writing is Romana Teague; the first of the three player characters, and the one you play most. There’s just this whole “quIRKy!!!” kind of aesthetic around her that permeates her sections and makes conversation sections with her kind of painful to go through, as this kind of penGUIN of DOOM!!! thing is present in nearly all the things she says, even beyond the dedicated “say something strange” option you can pick at nearly every dialogue choice. There’s also… this super weird disconnect from reality with nearly everything she does. Characters will never react to anything she says or does like any person realistically would, the most she gets being the occasional “man, you’re weird” before continuing on with what they otherwise would’ve said in the dialogue tree. There’s a scene where she can deadass assault one of the other player characters in the middle of what is presumably a public place and there are no consequences for it whatsoever. The most that happens is the person she punches just being like “man, you have a mean backhand” and then it’s never acknowledged again. And, like, one of the other player characters is a caustic asshole (to the point where his equivalent to Ramona’s “say wacky things” is “say something belligerent”) but at least the cut of his jib is funny and other characters appropriately don’t want anything to deal with him. Romana just… mostly kind of feels like a manic pixie dream OC, and while the game is very earnest in how weird it is every section where you play as Romana kind of brings it down, both because the weirdness on her part feels very artificial and because most of her stuff is… for lack of a better word, kinda cringe.

There are other bits and bobs that bring it down too. The game has… a marked tendency to put on the player what certain bits of backstory are through choice, which oftentimes left me just kinda unsure of what I was supposed to pick or why I would want to really pick any of the options there. There are bugs and softlocks aplenty, to the point where in this choice-based game I was forced into picking certain major choices because if I picked the other option the game would become unplayable. The handling of race and race issues is… not great. Beyond POC characters who were obviously written by white people, the way the game tackles it is… it’s kinda like it sorta decides it stops caring about even attempting to be sensitive partway through. There’s a Native American protester introduced in episode 1 who is portrayed as a fairly normal, down to earth dude, and then his first appearance in the second episode he goes into a story about how he got a head injury and now he can talk to the gods and he gets loonier from there. I… don’t particularly want to go into this one — mostly because I’m white and Australian and I don’t have near any of the knowledge or experience needed to talk about a lot of this — but the way he suddenly got derailed into full stereotype left a bad taste in my mouth.

And ultimately… I don’t know. I’m realizing a little bit right now that maybe I’m less positive on this game than I thought going into this review, but… even with the issues with the writing and all the other things that bring it down into ‘obviously not good’ territory I do think the things that work for it — the presentation, the choice system — are things that I’m willing to bat for. It’s certainly like Deadly Premonition or a David Cage game where half the fun is mostly in reacting to how bonkers it can get with friends or an audience and such, but even then… I think, even beyond the entertainment value, it’s still worth playing for yourself. Even if it’s not quite the greatest thing in the world. 5/10.