According to an interview, Hot Air — Nitrome’s first game — was allegedly inspired by Lemmings, with one of the developers getting the inspiration by using the fan tool in Lemmings 2. Sandman, their second game, takes its inspiration more directly. Your goal is to guide a bunch of sleepwalkers through fifteen levels by sprinkling sand on the ground, either to force them to change direction and stop them from killing themselves, or to change the terrain to allow them to scale walls. It’s simple, and… unlike Hot Air, mostly remains that way. While new obstacles, like instant death water, or evil sleepwalkers who will kill your sleepwalkers on touch, are added in as the game progresses, there’s no real spike in difficulty, and remains fairly basic from beginning to end. This is… more to its detriment, than anything. While there are moments of tension where you spend the entire level thinking on your feet, and levels where you have to figure out where exactly you’re meant to place your sand, the game, otherwise, is overtly willing to take it slow, trapping your sleepwalkers in one area while the player can do everything they need to beat the level. It’s fun, certainly, and there’s a decent cerebral loop in terms of figuring out what you’re meant to do, but as a whole… this is a game that really wears its particular influences on its sleeves, and while decent, doesn’t particularly stand out on its own because of it.

As a side note, as one of the (few) games so far ported out of Flash, I thought “okay, so I won’t run into anything that stops me from beating the game like in Hot Air,” I started it in HTML5 and for the most part that was true… but then I reached the end of level eight and the Sleepwalkers weren’t inclined to go through the gate, no matter what I did. I tried restarting to see if it was a one-off, and (after fighting through another glitch where your additions to the terrain stick around even after a restart) found that I couldn't actually beat the level. I was ready to call it a day and a DNF, but… then I returned to the Flash version and found that neither of those glitches were in effect there. While there did seem to be lag in how much sand you could put down, and while there seemed to be a different glitch where sometimes the Sleepwalkers would just ignore you when you did the thing that’s meant to change the direction they go in… the emulated version on flash runs better than the HTML 5 port? Maybe there are bugs only present in this particular port, but… I wouldn’t lie in that this might not bode well for the future…

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.

this game is incredible what the fuck are you people on about

Like okay, yeah, this is very clearly the developer's fetish, but even as far as fetish games go it isn't that weird, or even that invasive on the general product — I've seen AAA games even as recent as this year do the femme-fatale-hip-sway-walk in a way that's far more blatantly sultry. Yeah, it's... kinda shovelware-y, and anything enemies can do to you is negated by just... strafing, but it's honestly a little fun just mindlessly shooting, and the survival modes honestly do great at varying the terrains and seeing just how far you can go when the screen is flooded with dudes. Most of all I just love this game's vibe: from the shitposty tone of the cutscenes, to the oversaturated lighting, the absolutely garish, almost deep-fried colour scheme, and the pointless jump and dodge roll, it's very clear that this game isn't really taking itself seriously. And it manages to strike a good balance, in that vein, where it's ostensibly a bit goofy and bad and yet the game isn't trying too hard to lean into the joke. It's a good game to laugh with. And it's fun in general. I'm almost not being ironic here. I don't care what anybody says. I'm buying this on Playstation and I'm going to get the Platinum trophy. Just you watch me.

Nitrome’s first multiplayer game, and, as if to celebrate the occasion, a game that seems geared under the assumption you’re doing it co-op. You play as a troll (or as two trolls!) trapped inside a dungeon, the only way of escaping being to eat every other living thing inside. It feels… a lot like a top-down Kirby, if Kirby’s abilities ended at being able to suck things in and then projectile-spit them out: to beat enemies, you must first stun them by eating a part of the environment, which you then spit out to stun and then, hopefully, eat them. This game feels… slow: you can only complete levels once all enemies are dead, and this is a whole process of finding a block, spitting it at the enemy (potentially having to wait for it to start moving if it is one of the “I’m a turtle who’s invincible when I’m in my shell” dudes) and then walking over to eat it, all while levels tend to have at least ten enemies. Presumably, this is much smoother in co-op, where you and your partner can split off and do two things at once, but even then, this game feels too simple and braindead in difficulty to feel fun or rewarding to play. There are a bunch of different block types which all interact differently with you swallowing them up/spitting them out, in addition to all the different enemy types, but you stop seeing new things after the first third of the game, and even as late as the penultimate level you’re still dealing with the same enemies as you did right at the beginning, and while there are… sometimes frantic, sometimes finicky moments and mechanics, these are dispersed through a whopping 50 total levels (when the most a Nitrome game had before this was a measly 30) which mostly feel like a slow, inevitable trod to victory. When I was a kid, and when a lot of other Nitrome games weren’t ones I managed to beat, it felt great to actually clear one of these (and correctly guess what I at the time thought was a twist ending in the process). Now that I’m older, and now that I’m much more able to work through what… do still genuinely feel rather difficult, beating this doesn’t feel as rewarding or fun anymore.

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.

I think, maybe, if the enemy curve remained the same throughout the rising difficulty levels, or if the bonuses to your base stats remained as you did other modes, this could stand to still genuinely hold up the more modern generation of roguelites. The game mostly takes the veneer of a dungeon crawler — say, like, a Mystery Dungeon — tasking the player to descend the depths of a procedurally generated dungeon, collecting items and facing foes in order to fulfil one of four goals: slaying monsters, collecting gold, collecting orbs, or freeing fairies. I like how combat here is a give-and-take thing: sometimes you’re better off drawing your sword and whacking the monster in the way, but most of the time you’re better off either using one of your items to either kill it before it can touch you or avoid the encounter entirely — the abundance of treasure chests encouraging the player not only just to freely use their resources, but to do so creatively: baiting enemies one way before teleporting to the other side of the room, building bridges across gaps, taking aggro off you to make enough distance to pick up an item.

While it starts off easy, subsequent levels ask you to do more, go deeper into the dungeon, and fight tougher enemies earlier on, and… this is where I started getting turned off. There are ten levels (per goal type: 40 in total) and from level 5 onwards it starts getting rather unreasonable, less because the game makes you do more (I liked going further and further down each time!) the presence of later enemies in earlier floors turns the game into a test of luck: how many times you have to kill an enemy to proceed vs. how many items the game gives you to actually stand up to them. This is especially rough because, unlike the levels themselves, item pools are fixed: if you got something functionally or literally useless on one floor, you’ll know you’ll get that exact same thing the next run, and the run after that, so on and so on until you can finally move on. There are items that increase your stats (and clearing enough levels will also increase your max HP) to theoretically make combat more of a possibility, but they’re staggered in a way that you can never get enough of them for it to matter — even with defence upgrades certain enemies could still kill me from full health in one or two hits, which pairs even worse with how the simple act of moving next to an enemy will vortex you into hitting it with your sword: even if you have an item that’ll let you escape, or kill it in one hit, or even if you’re standing on the stairs you’ll be forced to attack it, and through that get hit much harder in retaliation. I oftentimes went through the first four or five levels of a goal type fairly easily then got absolutely walled once I hit level 6. It, uh, did not make me feel like doing more than I had to.

There is, however, one goal type that removes a lot of the chaff from item pools, giving the player more things they can actually use if you have to kill an enemy to get past — and even if it does get kinda rough later the earlier stages are tuned to a point which felt good to play, even long after I’d done enough to clear the level (I was stupid and initially thought the HP upgrades I was picking up were what were permanently upping my stats). As a whole, this was pretty solid for the time I gave it, but having seen where the game starts going, knowing that it somehow gets even more difficult… I think we’re both better off not giving it more.

Man, I wanted to like this game more than I did, especially since it starts out so well. I really love the way this game looks: the way the game integrates its FMV actors into pre-rendered backgrounds without either of these disparate styles clashing with each other, particularly the way both utilize colour scheme in a way to create a sense of seamlessness as to where, say, the FMV ends and the background begins. I liked a lot of the writing, especially how it handles its tone: the game really manages to capture the feel of, like, this grand historical adventure fun for the whole family (with an understated, yet effective sense of humour) but also, at points, becomes genuinely kinda grim in a way that’s rather dark for a piece of edutainment software, partially in some of the ways it shows the living conditions of the time and particularly in the story of its main character: what he goes through, and what he gets. I also appreciate how it attempts to cover subject matter in its historical period that might not be as well known as what’s in the public consciousness: rather than the direct conflict of the Crusades, it instead chooses to cover the internal conflict that resulted in the fall of Jerusalem. Instead of starring, say, the English or the Byzantines, it instead takes a uniquely French perspective on the time period, with an eye towards showing the Franc end of the conflict. This theoretically sets the stage really well to be a comprehensive learning tool, veering away from what the player is likely to already know in a way that encourages the beginning of an in-depth coverage of this particular period of history.

Unfortunately... I'm aware this is mostly a bit of a me thing, but also I think this game does have issues as a piece of edutainment software. The main way the game teaches about the historical period it covers is through the in-game encyclopedia: a fairly extensive tome for which reading and recalling it is key to solving the game's puzzles. This works really well!... if you're somebody who learns by reading and writing. If you're not — if, say, you have cognitive stuff that makes focusing on something and retaining the information from it really difficult — it's kind of painful, and on my end it eventually devolved into an exercise of brute forcing the puzzles, pixel hunting for things in the background, doing my best to try and focus on what the encyclopedia was saying... but eventually devolving into skimming because trying as such exhausted me, something not helped by how this game, I felt, veered a good bit longer than it should. And if going through an encyclopedia, looking for the fun facts you need to progress through, isn't quite how you learn, then... what this game offers in terms of edutainment is rather surface-level: perhaps if one was going through this without much historical or religious context then they'd learn something, but mostly what I got were things about the Crusades and Islam that I already knew from osmosis. Perhaps if I were more capable of being able to use the in-game encyclopedia then I would've been able to get more out of this, but if I wanted to try and fail to get something out of whatever wall of text is put in front of me, I'd rather just go back to high school.

One rather noticeable thing about the first Fatal Frame is that its localization... has issues, at least from my perspective. It’s immediately evident, whether it’s how every single voice actor sounds like they’ve overdosed on cold medicine and really could be doing more important things right now, or the subtle grammar errors — tense, plural conflicts, that thing thing in optical illusions where the last word of one line is repeated as the first word of the next line except that here, here, apparently, it's done completely unknowingly. A friend informed me before I started playing that I’d absolutely need a walkthrough, and while at first I chalked that up to general survival horror esotericness, soon upon starting the game I happened to stumble across a puzzle that was… completely untranslated. I was meant to press four out of ten buttons, on a circular structure, with an epitaph telling me to look at a note I’d collected which had a bunch of numbers highlighted in red. Presuming, maybe, that this was some sort of clock (albeit, one which used specific kanji for the numbers I’d never seen before) I tried to input the numbers roughly where they’d be on a Western clock, only for that to be incorrect. I decided that maybe this was why I was meant to have a walkthrough, looked the answer up, only to find that… I was correct. It was a clock. The buttons on the interface did represent numbers. I just happened to lack the cultural context to know that this specific clock… ran anticlockwise. Something that might have been much easier to figure out had any of the elements of the puzzle itself been translated.

If I were to hazard a guess as to why the localization effort turned out the way it did, I’d say… it’s because Fatal Frame leans far more into Japanese culture and folklore than any of its contemporaries. While most survival horror games up to this point — Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and Parasite Eve, among others — primarily took inspiration from Western horror movies, and to evoke this were usually set in some facsimile of the USA, Fatal Frame goes for… something loosely opposite. Rather than taking from the West, Fatal Frame draws from within, and as opposed to looking at at-the-time contemporary media — though the late 90s/early 2000s boom in J-Horror could’ve played a part — the game draws from local myth and folklore: specifically, the idea of the yūrei, figures analogous but not quite the same as the western idea of ghosts. Given all that, it can be seen that Fatal Frame is not quite equivalent to its brethren, and to approach it with the same treatment as something more naturally Western is a recipe for losing something in translation. And with glaring issues like the untranslated puzzles, and with stuff like, say, the kagome dolls which require cultural context to understand their implementation in-game, it makes other issues — such as the tense conflicts, or the voice acting — not quite as able to blend in as they might’ve for, say, the first Resident Evil. I’d like to note, for the record, that this doesn’t necessarily impact my feelings on the game itself (perhaps, if I really wanted the true Fatal Frame experience I should’ve not dropped out of doing Japanese at school while I was in the middle of a downward spiral), it’s just a case where unless you happen to know the language or have the cultural context you are going to need a walkthrough to understand this game, even beyond some of the usual survival horror trappings.

You play, primarily, as a young girl named Miku Hinasaki, whose brother disappears while searching for his teacher inside the supposedly haunted Himuro Mansion. As her search to find him takes her inside the mansion, she finds that all the ghost stories she’s heard are real: the mansion is littered with yūrei of varying levels of hostility, and only through the use of the Camera Obscura — an antique polaroid camera passed down through Miku’s family — does she have a chance at fighting back against those with more hostile intentions. As she delves deeper, upgrading her camera, accessing new parts of the mansion, collecting recordings and writings of those left behind, it soon becomes clear that your role here extends far past finding your brother and his teacher. A curse has infected the Himuro Mansion for generations, haunting, killing, and assimilating all who enter it, and as you delve further and further into the past, it soon starts to become clear that all this circles around a failed ritual, and the spirit of the woman who was meant to perform it: a spirit who, soon enough, proceeds to place their eyes on you.

I think what I’d particularly like to praise is just how incredible this game is at atmosphere. There are just so many little things that come together and really make it shine as a horror experience. I love the way the plot unfolds: how it initially begins with the plot thread of finding your brother and meeting the people he was trying to look for, before each subsequent chapter unfurls back, generation by generation, coming up against everybody laid victim by the curse until you eventually manage to reach its source. I like a lot of the artstyle, both in terms of helping the game feel smooth to play — how it handles you needing to light up dark areas without it feeling like a low-saturation hellscape, how subtle the fog is at walling off/impeding visibility past a certain point, how (for being translucent) immediately noticeable the ghosts are against the background — and also stylistically: the monochrome colour scheme when you’re looking into the past and the curse is about to take somebody feels so distinct, and also feeds into a couple of particular plot details in a way that feels pretty clever. While I did mention the voice acting as a negative during my preamble, it’s really effective coming out of the many enemies you fight: the monotone, slightly distorted delivery does a lot to show the otherworldly, not-quite-human-anymore nature of the spirits you face. I love the way the mansion changes between chapters: how certain doors lock and unlock, how some areas restock or get new items, how encounters shift to different locations: you’ll be going through the same general areas for the whole game, but the context for why you do so, and the purposes of each room can change radically between chapters which makes it feel like a whole new map each time. I’ve mentioned before how oftentimes it’s all the little things working in tandem that can really tie a horror game together, and I think Fatal Frame is a standout example on that front: all these tidbits which are fairly neat on their own really do their job to coalesce and create something special.

What differentiates Fatal Frame most from its survival horror contemporaries — aside from its set dressing of Japanese folklore — is its combat system. As opposed to being some sort of experienced fighter, using conventional weaponry to take down physical foes, Miku’s foes are much less tangible, and only through perceiving and documenting them with the Camera Obscura can you dispel them: eventually, with the goal of exorcizing them entirely. You do this via controlling the camera in first person (as opposed to the third person fixed camera movement of the rest of the game), and, upon locating your ghost, keeping your focus on them to build up spiritual power until eventually snapping a picture of them, doing increasing damage based on the type of camera roll/ammo you use and how long you were able to charge up for. There are various ‘special’ types of shot that reward special circumstances — such as taking a photo of multiple enemies at once, taking a photo when they're as close as possible to the camera, and, most importantly, taking a photo of an enemy right as they attack you — by multiplying damage and briefly stunning the enemy, heavily encouraging patience and fishing for the perfect shot.

However, enemies also become more complicated over time, and often engage in tactics primarily built to make you lose track of where they are: teleporting, cloning themselves, and phasing into walls and the floor both to try and protect themselves and sneak up on you. There are different types of enemies, who all react differently to your camera, and it characterizes the core conceit of the gameplay fairly well, going up against the spirit of the same person throughout their many haunts until you’re finally able to exorcize them for good. It also helps to create rather frenetic moments as you progress through the game: where you as the player scurry around the room to try and find the enemy that just disappeared, and where positioning is vitally important, both to get a wide, open range so that enemies don’t get too far out of sight, and to make sure nothing can sneak up where you won’t be able to see them. I love combat systems that manage to become more complex over time without adding extra mechanics to the core system, and for the most part, Fatal Frame is able to hit a sweet spot where combat feels tense without actively feeling adverse to play.

(I also really liked the incidental non-hostile ghosts: the ones you specifically need to listen to cues to find, or the ones you have to snap a picture of fast before they disappear forever. While some of them seem especially “you have to know in advance when and where these guys are going to pop up,” in a way that encourages replaying the game or buying a guide, it’s a cute little extra thing that you can do throughout the game and does a lot to characterize the mansion and the curse infecting it: showing just how many people have fallen victim and become trapped inside the mansion forever)

I say “for the most part,” because unfortunately, past a certain point, the game really starts feeling adverse to play, particularly in terms of combat. Ghosts really start leaning on teleporting the moment you so much as move the camera in their direction, which makes combat this frustrating dance of just trying to find the enemy in hopes that maybe this time you can actually do some damage to them. This’d be maybe fine, in moderation, and if there was at least some variance it’d be more bearable, but from chapter 3 onwards the game is basically nothing but constant encounters with the same annoying enemies and it’s a sloooooooog. It also plays badly with a lot of your resource management: you have to make do with taking low-damage pictures to enemies, which means you have to take a lot of them to actually put an opponent down, all the while one hit from them takes nearly half your health bar. This means you have to scrounge around the mansion, hoping the game will drop you stuff you actually need instead of fuel for special skills you don’t use… but also if you dare walk off the beaten path you get punished with combat with a special ghost who embodies everything that makes combat really intolerable at this point, and who will almost certainly hit you before you leave the room (because for some reason Miku never really feels that much of a need to, say, get through a door fast when there's something chasing her), necessitating save scumming or even more scrounging. It’s miserable, especially since this combat happens in lieu of any other mode of progression. No more puzzles, no more trying to find new parts of the mansion: everything after this point is just the same combat encounters over and over again.

At the very least, though, most of what else I found compelling remained as such even when the direct gameplay took a nosedive: the slowly unfolding history of the Himuro Mansion, the immaculate atmosphere and artstyle that made simply traversing the mansion an enjoyable experience when I wasn’t getting nothin’ personnelled by a ghost monk, and my attempts to get snapshots of as many of the incidental ghosts as I could. Even if the at-first unique combat system eventually loses its sense of where on the line it falls between exciting and frustrating, nearly everything else really holds up, and, if not quite picture perfect, isn't washed out at all, even with all the things that work against it. 8/10.

This was solid! What I think I appreciate most is how the game's tone can just completely turn on a dime. While for the most part, the story plays off the humour of its kooky, slightly exaggerated characters bickering with each other, the horror aspect of the game can suddenly rear its head and produce sections that feel genuinely stressful to play — hearing your friends slowly die over the radio as your hazmat suit slowly runs out of oxygen. The plot starts out mundane enough, where you and your friends seek a way out of a hospital while also trying to cure yourself from the various viruses you catch, but out of nowhere, near the end, it just becomes absolutely unhinged in a way that kinda has to be seen to be believed. I liked the adventure game mechanics, too, even if I was happy to have a walkthrough for most of it: the first-person linear hallways, the mostly sparse sound design, and the empty, almost decrepit landscapes do a lot to characterize the hospital you're trying to escape, and the varied time-limit mechanics do a lot to make the player hurry a bit as they try and solve inventory puzzles. I'm a bit less sure about how slowly you plod as you walk back and forth between areas (even if it does, admittedly, add something to the tension) and the controls as a whole feel... finicky, with how sometimes you have to walk in circles or attempt something several times for the game to continue, but as a whole I had fun with this! It perhaps wasn't my favourite thing in the world to play, but as an experience I definitely appreciated what it brought to the table, both in terms of its specific atmosphere (and how it could play with tension) and in terms of just how entertaining it was to watch unfold.

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.

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

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

My Dear Brother Jeff follows Liu, a very studious and devoted son, who one day is told by his parents that he really has a brother, and that his name is… “Jeffrey Dahmer.” No relation to any persons living or dead, of course: this is a Jeff the Killer RPGMaker fangame, after all. Jeff goes to the hospital to try and meet his brother for the first time, a magical fire, channelled by the Star of David, allows for Jeffrey Dahmer’s escape, and for him to then later come home and try to kill Liu’s family. What follows is a perpetual chase: one where you have to solve poorly communicated item/key puzzles, where the geography of the area will often trap you in a corner or give you no actual way of dodging Jeff, and where sometimes if you save in the wrong place you’ll load to Jeff instantly killing you. Everything is so dark that it’s really hard to know where and what you can do: something that doesn’t stop even when the endless chase does. There’s this one section where you escape your house by going through a network of tunnels that Jeffrey Dahmer apparently dug under your house and it’s impossible to see anything and it's the worst. At least none of that is present for the game’s final act. And, to its… credit, maybe, the game has a decently evocative artstyle (for better or worse) and the writing at least here seems more like a bad translation job. As far as these Jeff the Killer games go, this probably at least has the most going for it. Which is a low bar, but still. I have to take the positives where I can here. 2/10.

Of note: before now, this game in English (and its original French) was lost media for a really good period of time, after the developer uploaded a 2.0 in Spanish, deleted the originals, and then promised versions in other languages that never came. Luckily, I happen to have a friend who’s very gifted at internet sleuthing, and with some luck he managed to bring both versions of the game back from the dead. Here (English) they (French) are, if you’re interested! I’d recommend you play it yourself, or, uh, watch one of the many YouTube playthroughs that went up circa 2014. It’s really the kind of thing you have to see with your own eyes.

Having played some really inventive and cool RPGMaker games, it’s fascinating to look at the other side of the coin and look at games where the developers… don’t quite know what they're doing. Take I S O L A T I O N, for example, a game where you must solve puzzles to escape your house, where the core conceit of gameplay is… checking the hundreds of closets in your mansion and hoping that Jeff the Killer isn’t hiding in them. There’s no indication or hints towards which closets have items and which closets have instant game overs: you have to check each closet manually, reload after every game over, all in hopes that the room you’re in actually has something useful in the closets. There are also some other incredible bits of game design: the game, for some reason tries to fake that it has a loading screen… but actually the game is just waiting around and doing nothing for about ~15 seconds. Sometimes you’ll be trapped inside a room after you enter it, or unable to progress to an item on the floor: not because of a locked door in your way, or anything, but because your Victorian manor has suddenly spawned boulders which you need to find a way to break. I was having a good time, despite the lack of quality, up until… in a room where you must find one particular painting out of a total of 48 (lest Jeff The Killer somehow be hiding inside the painting), you must also make sure to lock the door behind you before you select the correct painting… something you cannot do, because the developer somehow managed to delete the event that allows you to lock the door, thus making the game unbeatable. A bit of a shame — I’m not a fan of having to leave something uncompleted — but, uh, given the game as a whole beforehand, maybe having this one glitch out and be unbeatable isn’t that much of a bad thing.

This was cute! Comedic takes on Dracula, I feel, are a bit more common nowadays than works that take him seriously — moreso than any of his gothic horror contemporaries — but the writing here did well to take it in a different direction than most and genuinely caught me off guard during a couple of moments. I also appreciate the small scale of the adventure game design: with only a handful of rooms and only a handful of things you can interact with, it's much less likely you gloss over anything during your search, and worst comes to worst it's not too much of a time investment to brute force anything. The puzzles felt inventive and possessed some fairly clever solutions, though one of them in particular I felt like I could've received more direction on — I thought I had the right answer but I wasn't entirely sure how I was meant to apply it, the obvious routes in particular either not being selectable or resulting in generic dialogue. The voice acting is... hit or miss: while a good portion of it works fairly well, other parts stand out for... not having great sound quality, or otherwise feeling kind of off. Overall, though, I enjoyed this! It's maybe more of a 👍/10 for me than anything that'll really stick, but even then looks neat, it's fairly short, and I like this particular take on a comedic Dracula. Check it out! I wouldn't sleep on this.