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.

I’ve mentioned in other reviews how throwbacks to retro horror — usually the early survival horror era of tank controls and fixed camera angles — often take the limitations or design elements and crank them up way rougher than they ever felt in their inspirations. Having played a lot more of the survival horror canon now… it’s a case where while there’s basis in these sorts of things being in the originators it feels way exaggerated, in a way that feels considerably worse to play when oftentimes the inspiration was rather simple in application. Like, there’s ‘you can only save with a specific item you must collect,’ and then there’s ‘you can only save at the shop using the in-game currency, which you can only get from killing enemies, but also this in-game currency is also used to get better weapons and medkits and ammo.’ Not to mention things such as mazes or stealth sections that… weren’t really in these old survival horror games and don’t mesh with their constraints (fixed camera, tank controls) at all. There’s credit where credit is due where impersonating the aesthetic of these old games is concerned — especially in Alisa’s case, given it allegedly can be played on period-accurate hardware — but frequently it’s the gameplay itself that betrays that it’s… not a perfect recreation, and in Alisa’s case is what primarily lets it down.

You play as the titular Alisa, a military officer in some western-European country around the 1920s. While chasing down a spy for the “blue prints” they’ve stolen, Alisa finds herself beset by doll-like creatures and taken to a mysterious mansion — one she is trapped inside, and one where everything is out to get her. With nothing on her except what she can scavenge, Alisa must enter the survival horror: explore the mysterious mansion and all its many areas, fight all its denizens, and hopefully uncover its mysteries and find a way out before it’s too late.

I think my favourite thing about this game is how it captures its aesthetic, both in graphical design and gameplay. The game nails the low-poly look of its inspirations, but not in a way that shoots itself in the foot: there’s enough of an eye towards both the graphical artstyle and the cinematography of the fixed-camera-angle that most locations you go through look rather distinct and striking. I’m especially into the gothic horror overtones: it’s a vibe I… haven’t really seen before in survival horror games like these, and I really love the way things such as dollhouses, puppets, and clockwork interweave through the mansion and provide a consistent throughline, even despite how hard each area can vary in look. I also like how this manages to extend into enemy design: there are a ton of different foes you brush up against throughout the game, and in addition to them all looking unique and varied they function as such as well — movesets and movements and special mechanics that make each fight (or flight) different than the one before. I’m a fan of when a nice artstyle manages to stretch into and improve other areas of the game, and here in particular I’m really into how the aesthetic makes each area feel distinct and different to play, in a way that then feeds into the survival horror: you solve puzzles and fight enemies to access new areas of the house, but you don’t quite know what you’re going to see until it’s right in front of you.

I was also super down for some of the ways the game iterates on the PS1-survival horror formula. While you’re still capable of finding supplies such as ammo or medkits through scavenging the mansion, most of what you get comes from a shop you find early on, the currency for which you get… coming exclusively from killing enemies. This introduces a new element of resource management, and works well as a sort of double-edged sword. Unlike, say, the first Resident Evil (or at least the remake) where the threat of resource drain or Crimsonheads encouraged you against fighting enemies, here it becomes a choice: do you want to get that shiny new weapon/want to try and save and find yourself too short on what you need to get it? What enemies are still around? Do you reckon you can kill one efficiently enough to actually get a return on your investment? This all adds a new layer to gameplay, and pairs really well with how varied enemies are. I’m also a fan of some of the other things you can buy in the shop, even if during my run I was often too poor to take advantage of them. Getting your pick of reward after killing a boss is a neat choice for the player, given that what they don’t pick is lost forever for that playthrough. Modifications seem neat — and even if I’m not generally a fan of “you can’t use these cool things if you want the good ending,” I like how it ties in lore-wise. Dresses are fun cosmetics, and the additional effects they give Alisa allow the player to finetune their stats to their playstyle. The shop, and the mechanics regarding money in general were a really cool addition to this type of game, both in terms of the mechanics surrounding them on their own and the additional cool things the shop gives the player access to.

Other iterations, however… fare less well. While the shop, in general, does a lot of cool things with the PS1 survival horror formula, some of the other things mostly just… don’t mesh and are super annoying to play around. It’s oftentimes a case where… the game will stop what it’s doing to become something else but that something else… really does not work well in a game such as this. There’s one part of the game which is flat-out a stealth section — one which comes down to “run to these specific points at this specific time or face instant death,” one which… has no room for experimentation or doing it faster than the game wants you to, and due to the fixed camera angles often results in you being unable to see where the things you’re meant to stealth past… even if the player character themselves wouldn’t have that problem. Right after this is a boss fight, which I’d prepared and stocked my items up for... only to find out that actually this specific boss was actually a rather clunky rail shooter, where you can’t heal, can only barely dodge certain attacks, and one where ‘aim’ and ‘move’ are bound to the same keys, which rather than seeming like a fair challenge just feels really annoying to deal with, where whatever skill you’ve picked up through playing the game is moved to the wayside in favour of trying to figure out this brand new style of play the game has just thrown on you.

Combat… also becomes rough once you start finding more advanced enemies. Some mechanics get attached to enemies, and while sometimes it works and makes them fairly fun to play around sometimes it… doesn’t. There are these mermen skeleton enemies which have a dismemberment mechanic — where depending on where you aim you might just knock off one of their limbs and make them angry — but in practice, it’s not really possible to know what body part the game thinks you’re aiming at, so it ends up with you accidentally knocking off their hand or head rather than killing them… after which they immediately just hitstun you to death because hitstun on the player is majorly jank. There are so many points where you’ll get hit, knocked down… and then you’ll lose much more HP because the enemy will attack you and knock you down again literally the moment you get up. Your best strategy, particularly against bosses or tougher enemies, is to kite them, which… works way too well for its own good. Enemies generally move at the same speed the player does, rather than faster or slower, which can result in loooooong stretches of you and the enemy walking around each other, the fight not progressing because neither of you are in range to actually try to attack. I literally beat one boss because all of their attacks could be easily dodged by… just walking backwards around the arena. It’d be easy to brush off this jank as trying to be accurate to the old survival horrors of yore, or stating that the frustrating/sloggy parts as making the game feel more stressful or tense… but it feels at odds with itself. In, say, Resident Evil or Silent Hill (where fighting felt way more smooth regardless), combat was often a last resort if you couldn’t run from a situation, and added to the tension due to providing consequences, either in the short term (resource drain) or the long term (killing the enemy resulting in something worse taking its place later). Here, the shop system encourages you to try your hand fighting enemies… which then works against itself given how combat oftentimes doesn’t stand out for the better.

Which is a shame, because initially I was super vibing with this game, and even when things started to get annoying later I was still really into the parts that won me over at the beginning of the game. Regardless of its issues, I was still really into a lot of the things it brought to the table, and I still really like the dollhouse, gothic horror puppetry aesthetic. It’s just a shame that I started to notice the strings after a while, and got to see just how many knots were tangling the experience up. 6/10.

Toilet in Wonderland is a game where the heroine has severe constipation. One day, when you try to go poopie, you awaken to find yourself in a strange world where nothing seems quite normal. You are visited by MJ, who tells you your purpose: this is a world born when you started your poop, and only by releasing the poop from your tushie can you free yourself. You must now explore the corners of the world, gather up a party, and search for six mystical toilets, all in the name of freeing yourself — both from this wonderland, and from your severe constipation.

This game is wild. It was made by, like, 100 different devs as part of a con, and while you can see the different visions create vastly different events, it's all in service of the… incredibly surreal, shitposty (that's not a pun this game's about constipation you are literally not shitting) tone. The game doesn’t operate by any sort of rules or sense — and anything can happen around any corner. That’s not to say that there’s no consistency, or it’s just a game where weird stuff happens — there’s a sense of cause and effect, and jokes you thought were one-and-done can sometimes sneak back up when you don’t expect it. I also love the way the graphics kind of contribute to it: the majority of it is store-bought RPGMaker assets… but then out of nowhere you'll also just see these crudely hand-drawn pictures or ripped photos of real people. It's inconsistent, in a way that catches you off guard, but also in a way that really helps contribute to the specific vibe the game's going for.

And honestly, like… there’s not, particularly much more I can say than that? This is the kind of thing where I can’t really go into specifics without ruining the experience. I’d say that maybe I could’ve used some indication of where items/doors were things I could actually interact with, but aside from that… it’s a free, quick game that does a lot with a little, and handles its out-there vibes so well. 7/10.

Before having actually played Mario: The Music Box, most of what I knew was that it was a fairly standard RPG Maker horror game… which made the strange decision of starring the Super Mario Bros, of all people. Having now been able to play it myself, I have to say… yeah what an absolutely baffling choice. Like, way to just completely undercut the serious horror tone you’re going for. It’s hard to take the descriptions of all your gruesome fates so seriously when the main character is making Mario noises as he gets impaled through the throat. It’s hard to really read the interactions between you and the very edgy and serious original characters the way the developer intended when they’re anime OCs and Mario is precisely half their size. Maybe if it leaned into the premise a little and treated it in more of a… black comedy sort of way (watch Mario die over and over and over and over-) but as it stands it’s… caught in a little bit of a catch-22: Mario being the main character undercuts everything the tone is going for, but were Mario not in this game at all… there wouldn’t really be much notable about this, honestly.

The plot follows Mario, of the Super Mario Bros as he investigates an abandoned house on the edges of the Mushroom Kingdom. Upon finding a mysterious music box, Mario soon finds zombie ghosts converging in on him, and he now cannot leave this place. Now he, Luigi, and The Third Mario Brother Byakuya Togami a stranger named Riba must find a way through the horrors of the house, with danger lurking along every corner the game explicitly warns you not to go down. Amidst it, one particular entity places its sight on Mario, and what follows is a conflict: one for Mario’s body, and one for Mario’s sanity………………………………………………………..

I’ll give this game credit: there’s an insane amount of effort put into it. That’s not a “you tried” sort of thing: the production value in this game is insane. Every story event, ending, and death has multiple hand-illustrated CGs visually depicting whatever’s happening. There are precisely 559 of these — multiple for each event — and they do a lot to show what’s happening, beyond the limits of what you can do with RPGmaker (unless you’re really good at sprite animation) and helping make each death feel, theoretically, that much more impactful. The sprite art, both for the characters and the general environment, is fairly aesthetically pleasing, even if the low saturation made seeing certain things sort of a pain. There are also, like, just straight-up custom animations made in the same style as the CG, both for… a Kingdom Hearts or When They Cry-esque opening video and also for a fully stylized RPG boss fight in one of the endings. Even with games such as Ib or The Witch’s House, most of what they had was limited to pixel art and ways to play around RPGMaker limitations. This… goes on a whole different level in terms of production value, and you can really tell that this game was made by an artist.

…You can also tell, however, that this game wasn’t made by a writer. This goes beyond the whole “story expects to be taken deathly seriously while also starring Mario” thing. For as much as the art works to make the many deaths you suffer feel evocative, the writing… does the opposite. Characters just matter-of-factly describe the way they die, and the sameyness (and also clunkiness) of these descriptions does a lot to undercut how varied and sometimes visceral these death sequences can be. Maybe if they were shorter, and leaned towards the visuals rather than the written, then they’d be more effective, but as stands most of them felt drawn out and kinda clunky. The plot, too, for as seriously it takes itself, has… issues. There’s a lot of characters (and also through this a lot of characters who just… drop out of the narrative) a lot of re-explanations of things the game forgot it already told the player, and a lot of cases where… the narrative doesn’t really have the effect it’s intending. Like, yes, this person who murdered their entire extended family because she wanted to be immortal like her boyfriend sure is actually a sympathetic victim of society. The titular music box… sure does matter a lot in the story. Ultimately, like, yes, it is incredibly silly that this story stars the Mario Brothers… but even if that wasn't there to undercut everything I really don't think this plot and story would be able to stand on its own.

And game-design wise… it’s no Ib or Witch’s House. The area design… leans linear, but areas are large enough that at points it’s easy to get lost on what you’re meant to do next. Puzzles… are mostly the sort of bread and butter “put a key in this keyhole to put a key into another keyhole-” that… doesn’t really feel all that unique or fun to play out — honestly, most of the puzzles I saw here were already things I’d seen in other games. Deaths are… very telegraphed: rather than the sudden, brutal ends you’d receive even if you thought you were going the right way, you’re kind of blatantly suggested that you shouldn’t go down this path and if you do then you get an overtly prolonged description as to why the obvious mistake was, in fact, a mistake. They’re also a little samey in that regard: literally every time you deal with a possessed person the answer is to violence the ghost out of them. Every time you're given the option to try to jump — y'know, like Mario is oft to do — it fails and you die. In terms of RPGMaker horror games it’s on the less ingenious end, and that could be fine… but I think the specific horror gameplay tropes they lean into are kind of the more irritating ones to deal with.

And in the end, when… a lot of the individual elements don’t really hold under scrutiny, and the only thing that particularly stands out in the first place is the strange decision to use Mario as the main protagonist, it’s easy to tell how this game has the little bit of infamy it has. And while there would be a way to make these particular ideas work, here… they don’t. Not in the way the developer intended. 4/10.

The tagline for Ridley Scott’s Alien, ‘In space, no one can hear you scream,’ beyond being an indicator of what the movie is about (it’s a horror movie! in space!), also works as an ethos statement for the general genre of sci-fi horror. Having gone through… quite a bit of works in that vein over the past few months, a lot of what the genre tries to evoke is a sense of… wonder fueled by human technological advancement versus a fear of the unknown: humanity breaking through the frontier into a brave new world, only to find something far, far beyond comprehension on the other side — with themes of trying to understand the core of humanity as it faces against an existential threat. Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey is an ode to the sci-fi horror films of the 80s, particularly the works of John Carpenter, and… while it does harken to a lot of familiar tropes from its parent series — the end of the world, the fabled war between the forces of God against their demonic brethren, and a featureless player-insert choosing just how humanity continues on — blends these ideas with those proliferated in sci-fi horror in a way that feels… honestly seamless in how it’s portrayed, a change in tone and presentation that doesn’t sacrifice any of the core ideals that define what Shin Megami Tensei is about.

The story is set in some approximation of the present or the near future. Humanity is booming with unchecked prosperity when one day, a black-hole-esque growth comes out of the south pole and starts rapidly spreading across the surface of the Earth. With all attempts to research or halt it failing, the United Nations decides that they’re actually going to do something about the apocalyptic threat (the most sci-fi thing about this tbh) and send four teams into what they dub ‘The Schwarzwelt,’ each equipped with the most advanced technology humanity can offer. What they find, upon delving in, is a world of demons based on mythology, built off of humanity’s failings and fashioned after their sins. Three of the four teams are annihilated upon attempting to enter. The last — a ship called the Red Sprite — now faces impossible odds, having to push further and further into the Schwarzwelt, commune and battle with the angels and demons inside, and hope, maybe, that there’s a chance for humanity lying at the end of it.

It’s… a simple plot — one that almost feels episodic, in ways, as you solve problems, then find more problems to solve, then solve them, then find more problems — but it works, which is a lot of the game’s ethos with its writing. The crewmates of the Red Sprite… are mostly just one or two personality traits given a face and a name, but they’re written pretty well for that: they’re fun and likable and I always made sure to talk to all of them while I was on the ship just to see if their dialogue updated. What happens outside of the ship… the game doesn’t really hold back. It conveys the feeling of fighting the hopeless fight really well. Every single mission is this relentless push deeper and deeper into the Schwarzwelt, with no guarantee that you’ll reach your goal or make it back. A good amount of the strike team with you are basically red shirts — even if they get names there’s no guarantee whether they’ll make it through or become a demonstration for how dangerous the next area is. A good amount of the time you don’t even get the privilege of trying to advance your goals: some unprecedented disaster will happen to the crew and it’s up to you to prevent total wipeout. There are characters you meet who pretty obviously don’t have your best interests at heart, but you’ve got no option but to go along with them because you don’t have other options to go with. Throughout the game, you don’t even know whether going through the Schwarzwelt will actually save the Earth — your only choice is to try to progress and persevere and try and see if there truly is a way out. It’s simple (and this writeup excises some of the more spoilery things that happen) but it’s effective, and really works to make you feel the odds you’re going against on this mission.

Gameplay is kind of like… the edgy adult Pokemon game all those nerds on Reddit could only dream of. At its core, it's a monster collection RPG: the demons you fight are also the party members you recruit, whether you get them from a conversation minigame or by fusing other demons together. Unlike Pokemon, however, you can’t keep the same team through the whole game — demons can’t learn skills bar certain circumstances, and the exp requirements often make trying to level up your demons seriously grindy past their first few, requiring you to constantly iterate and fuse new demons to keep up with the arms race of the level curve. Shaking up your team is made more worth it by D-Sources — items you get via using a demon enough that lets you add its skills to any one demon you fuse in the future. There are also special fusions you can perform to get bosses or powerful demons unavailable regularly, which creates a fun, if sometimes drudgey hunt for whatever ingredients you need, made worth it by how strong and customisable these demons tend to be at the time you get them.

Team composition is consistently important, if less because of how specific encounters require specific strategies and more because of the game’s type chart. Each demon has its own elemental weaknesses and resistances, and in addition has its own alignment, one out of Law, Neutral, or Chaos. Should you find out what the given weakness of a demon is, and hit it, all demons matching your alignment will also strike it for more damage than they’d all do individually. This creates a challenge in team-building: both to create a crew that covers all elemental bases, but also to keep in mind alignments so that every demon on your team can take advantage of these co-op attacks. It’s simple — and from what I understand a lot more so than most other SMT games — but it's the right kind of grindy: addictive, but with enough depth and requirement for thought that it doesn’t feel shallow at all.

I also loved exploring the Schwarzwelt. It’s a first-person, grid-based set of dungeons, and ones that just seem to get larger and larger the more you explore them. By exploring — whether by progressing the story or by collecting materials off the ground — you gain these little ingredient materials called forma, and with forma you gain Sub-Apps, passive upgrades to yourself, little ways to alter your party, and, most importantly, ways to open gates, get past barriers, and allow you to explore even more of the Schwarzwelt. It almost feels like a metroidvania, in ways — upgrades you get allow you to access hidden parts of earlier areas, often containing their own challenges and giving rewards that… are either obsolete (whoops, should’ve come back here earlier) or give you something absolutely worth coming back for. Across the world, also, are sidequests you can seek out, encouraging you to explore more or do battle — either with tough opponents or tough restrictions. Your rewards are often material, and worth doing the quest for, but a lot of the virtue for me in doing them was just to enjoy the snippets of writing that go along with them — isolated episodes unrelated to the greater plot which often give the game an excuse to have some fun with its regular enemies and one-shot characters, in turn making the world of the Schwarzwelt feel so much more full.

I’d also like to shout out the way this rerelease handles its extra content. Oftentimes, when Atlus ports or updates one of their games, whatever new content is added is usually… contentious — Persona 4 Golden and Catherine Full Body, in particular, getting scrutiny for the way the new content and characters mesh/get in the way of the original narrative. Strange Journey, from what I understand, got that same criticism from gamers (for… some reason), which kind of surprises me because honestly the inclusion of a new dungeon in the Womb of Grief and the new endings felt totally smooth, mostly because of how it… doesn’t really overwrite the original game at all. The new dungeon, and the story content associated with it, is completely optional aside from when it’s initially shown to you (to the point where you can just ignore it and complete the game without touching it), but even beyond that… I honestly liked going through the new content?

Specifically, I kinda like how they used it as a way to iterate and address issues with the original 2009 release. I’m aware that there was pretty major criticism of the way the original release handled your alignment, and I like how the game addressed that with the new endings, both functioning as a continuation of the original game within the rerelease, and as a way to go for Law or Chaos without explicitly getting a bad ending. In addition, a lot of the extra sub-apps that you get from this dungeon seem to be quality-of-life improvements meant to help out with annoyances present in the original game: finding invisible floors or pitfalls, being able to find hidden doors without looking directly at them, etc. I… don’t think these should have been relegated to the bonus content — as that means someone who elects to skip it has a much rougher time with the main game — but it’s neat how this bonus content has been used to help address both story and gameplay concessions. Beyond that, though, even if you’ve never played the original, I still really enjoyed going through the Womb of Grief as a gameplay experience. It’s a dungeon that effectively expands with each new gadget you get in the main story and is host to some fun characters and some fairly tough challenges. I do question how much doing the Womb broke the balance of the main game — it seemed once I started I definitely stayed ahead of the curve level wise — buuuuuut that wasn’t particularly a dealbreaker for me, and I still felt the challenge was pretty appropriate even with the extra content added.

I do have complaints. While I was… surprisingly okay with how mean the game could get with its dungeon design I do wish it varied up in method more: the first teleporter maze was fun and cheeky, but I really started to get annoyed (and not in the intended way) when they appeared in basically every dungeon and eventually every dungeon floor afterwards. For as much emphasis as the game puts on mapping the Schwarzwelt the touchscreen features felt lacking compared to, say, Persona Q: I would’ve liked to draw my own map, especially when certain rooms made the auto-map not work. The previous two problems kind of get combined with some of the metroidvania elements — sometimes you’ll get an upgrade that solves a navigational issue but then… run into that exact same navigational issue and be told you need a better version of the upgrade you just got to get through this particular edition of the problem. Some of the final bosses straight up read your inputs in a way to limit your options and make entirely valid strategies arbitrarily invalid: I noticed one of them liked to open with a full-party magic blast, so I bred up something fast with a magic reflecting spell to get some extra damage in… and then every time I tried the boss decided that actually, they’d just use a different move (or even later, where I got hit with an immediate unavoidable OHKO move for daring to fight the boss a different way). I… okay maybe this one goes under ‘skill issue’ or ‘me problem’ but I also wish the game had an autosave? At multiple points I’d get unlucky, die… and then because I forgot to save manually I lost literal hours of progress in either sidequests or the main story, with getting back to the original point feeling like an utter slog. I get that this is a rerelease of a game in a particular design era for RPGs where autosave isn’t common, but… for a series like SMT where high difficulty and a low tolerance for mistakes, I do feel like actually dying should be more of a slap on the wrist than a major setback.

Other than that, though, I really enjoyed my time with Strange Journey! From a story that manages to blend the tropes of its parent series with that of a completely different genre, and with gameplay that’s… super addictive in how simple yet complex it is, Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey really does a lot with a little, and, with the new content added in the Redux version, does a lot to improve upon the interesting, but flawed game it used to be. 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.

So I’ve been working through the Yakuza series over the past couple years, and despite what my… rather slow pace (one game a year, so far) would tell you, I’ve been enjoying my time with them! As a whole, the series has… a pretty undeniable formula attached to it, but one that’s so effective it’s hard to really knock the games down for it: the hybrid beat-em-up with RPG elements makes it really addictive to just style and totally not kill all the thugs that come your way, and the open world cities you get to explore are so expansive, with oodles of sidequests and new game modes and minigames you can discover so long as you’re willing to take the scenic route. Yakuza 0, of the three I’ve played so far, has pretty easily been the highlight so far: with a plot that makes the most of its two protagonists and cities to intertwine into something that I was super invested in by the end, with just an insane amount of content that the 72 hours I played only felt like it was scratching the surface. Yakuza Kiwami, on the other hand, felt like a downgrade. It was still fun to play, but a lot of it just felt… honestly like a way stripped-down version of 0, in terms of the places you could go and the things you could do, and the few iterations that were there felt like straight downgrades. However, when I started playing Kiwami 2, I felt an immediate, immense improvement, and as I continued going through the game, and continued to have… quite a lot more fun than I did with Kiwami 1, I figured ‘hey, I like this series, enough to consider getting 100% for at least one of them, why not this one? It might be fun.’

It wasn’t!

It was kind of a pain, actually!

Like, I’m not one to try and get 100% for games usually, mostly because it’s just not my vibe or the way I play games, but here in particular… getting 100% was kind of rough. The appeal of games as vast as this to me is that you can kind of pick and choose what you want to do: if you find a side thing that’s super addictive, you can pursue it to your heart's content — I can attest to getting obsessed and completing an entire six-hour side-mode in the space of, like, a single night. If there’s something you don’t vibe with, well, then, you don’t have to! You can just ignore it, choose something else, and never have to deal with it… unless you have to for 100%. Anything you only gave a surface-level glance at because you weren’t really into it is now something you have to go into in-depth, and any issues that might have been dealbreakers are now things you have no choice but to deal with in your quest to get that completion list checked off. I wouldn’t really say it made a notable impact on my enjoyment of my overall product — I can recognize that doing this was my mistake and not necessarily an indictment on the game — but… I’d be lying if I said that going for full-game completion made me more aware of things I would’ve been willing to ignore before, and made things that were little problems… quite a bit more pleasant.

The game follows the continued adventures of ex-yakuza Kazuma Kiryu, who… okay I know this review has started out notably negative for something I gave an 8/10 but I could barely follow what was going on this time around. I could kind of get what was going on until chapter 5 or so, but then it just feels like everything gets sidetracked in the midst of exploring the mythology and interfacing with oodles of characters who… precede to either bite it or just never appear beyond this game. It all coalesces into something simple that can essentially be boiled down to ‘these are the bad guys, beat them up,’ but in the midst of everything the billed main antagonist, and the supposed rival Dragon to Kiryu… honestly feels sidelined in his own game, only popping up occasionally to establish that he is, in fact, the antagonist and rival, and that he and Kiryu are finally going to have that showdown even- whoops actually this is all about the Korean mafia actually time to focus on them. Kiwami had similar problems, but I felt like it managed to sidestep them — for as much as it does feel derivative gameplay-wise of 0, having many of the same characters appear in the prequel does give them more of an impact here, and Kiryu’s relationship with many of the major figures (especially with his goddaughter, Haruka, or with his rivalry with Majima) provided a throughline that… even when things felt confusing or convoluted, I still felt connected. Here, there were moments I enjoyed, but as a whole, I tended to put the story on hold because going to do it often felt like I was pulled away from the things I liked just so I could watch cutscenes for half an hour.

At least when I was finally free to explore the city and just do what I want, or when the cutscenes end and I’m allowed to actually do stuff, the gameplay really kicks in. Enemy encounters are simple, but addictive. It’s like a 3D beat-em-up — you’re surrounded by dudes, usually five to one, but those dudes are usually always much weaker than you, and combat often comes down to how much you just want to style on them. You can buy or pick up different weapons which change up your moveset, and should you hit your opponents enough time your heat gauge fills up, allowing you, amongst other options, to perform one of many context-based super moves on your opponent, often just absolutely fucking them up in a way that makes you question if they’re actually able to get up again afterwards. Power — and the vast gulf between Kiryu and the random thugs who fight him on the street — is kind of the name of the game. There are just so many options for items you can get or things you can do to your opponents, like stealing their weapons from them, getting one of your friends or allies to do something nasty to them, or, my favourite: doing a grab on them, and then trying to aim so that when you throw them they sail over a railing, off a bridge, and into the river below. There are a lot of options in just how you can demolish encounters, and part of the appeal is just seeing what you can do.

It’s not all a cakewalk, though, and when you’re up against somebody a bit closer to your level, they let you know. There’s a surprising amount of depth in your defensive options, between your parry and your guard and your quickstep, and while I was… a bit too button mashy of a gamer to really focus on those as opposed to tunnel-visioning on heat moves, it’s nice that they’re there and that they’re things that get used when the game requires you to get good. Boss encounters, in particular, are where the combat of this game can be at its best, and while they can be easy to breeze past with boosted stats if you did a lot of side stuff like I did there’s still a lot to enjoy: the spectacle, the varied movesets the player can try to learn, and all the different arenas that both you and the enemy can use against each other. I especially love the way Kiwami 2 utilizes the heat mechanic in boss battles: when a boss is on their last health bar, the fight stops, and you have to rapidly press a button to gather heat and unleash it: should you do so, you enter a quick time event that allows you to potentially instantly (and brutally) end a fight. It’s an improvement over Kiwami’s attempt at the same system (one where the boss will just rapidly regenerate their health unless you use one of the same three heat moves on them), and it’s a great way of ending a fight and ensuring your victory, bringing your opponent down to the same level as all the common thugs around the city.

But really the appeal to this game is the wealth of things you can do on the side. While Yakuza 1 (and Kiwami) mostly played its interactions with the Japanese underworld straight, 2 finds room instead to get a little more adventurous with things, and it stands out all the more for it. So many of the substories just go in wild directions and it's so entertaining to see Kiryu be the straight man in all these wacky scenarios. I appreciate, also, how much of a period piece this feels. I don’t know whether this was stuff originally in Yakuza 2, or whether Kiwami 2 added this stuff in hindsight, but I love how what was initially intended as a picture of modern-day Japan instead became a period piece, featuring all the innovations of the era that are so obviously outdated today. The sidemodes, too, profess some fairly fun writing: the stories themselves are fairly simple, which allows them to lean fairly hard on their cast of fun and quirky characters, all of which you can spend time with via hangouts and sometimes even sidequests attached to these specific characters. While there were definitely moments I enjoyed during the main story, I think it’s when I trod off the beaten path and explored the side content that I most enjoyed the game’s writing.

Of course, even then, the side content wouldn’t have measured up if it weren’t at least fun to go through, which, luckily, a good portion of it was! I mentioned above in my preamble that one of the benefits of games like these where there’s just a lot of stuff to do is that you can pick and choose what you actually want to go through, and while going for 100% meant I had to do stuff I also thought was kinda lame, I can’t deny that I still really enjoyed a lot of the side content here. Two favourites, in particular, were karaoke and the Cabaret Club Czar, the former being a series staple I frequently returned to even after I’d done everything I needed to do there because I liked trying to get a perfect score and also wanted to see all the special animations with the people you can take there, and the latter, a return from Yakuza 0 (being the minigame mentioned above where I just hyperfocused it over the course of an entire weekend), now considerably less grindy and with little iterations that make the whole experience feel better. While going for 100% does kind of expose you to the… less than stellar bits of side content, it also makes you take a look at stuff you might have overlooked before, and give you a chance to experience and change your mind about it. I’d never gone to the colosseum of bonus bosses in either of the two Yakuza games beforehand (mostly because I think when I unlocked it in 0 I was at the point where I was powering forward to finish the game), but doing it for the first time for 100% this game… actually proved fun, even despite me being a good bit over-levelled for it. There are things here I’d definitely do if I ever see them again in a future game, and I guess I should thank the 100% run for exposing me to it.

One last note, and one maybe less relevant to this game than to the series as a whole: I often feel like these games are low-key really bad at trying to teach the player its concepts? Maybe it’s just due to the way my brain is wired, but oftentimes instead of actually demonstrating or showing how to do something it’ll instead display a giant wall of text and hope the player retains all the things they need to know, no matter how simple or complex the mechanic is. And unless you’re able to retain everything you need to know — or so long as you’re okay with looking it up again and again — you’re just going to approach certain parts of, say, a minigame, and have no clue what to do. And that’s if the manual itself teaches you what you need to know: the tutorial for mahjong, on the last page, goes ‘oh by the way you could have a valid winning deck but it won’t actually count unless it’s yaku’ without ever explaining what yaku is. I had to google it just so I could know what that meant and nothing I found really gave me a conclusive answer. Again, not as bad here as it is in say, 0, but given that this is the third Yakuza game in a row that seems to think that drowning them in text is equal to being able to teach them how to play it… my impression is that this isn’t a problem that’s going to be fixed anytime soon.

But as a whole, and despite how negative parts of this review may seem, I enjoyed my experience with Kiwami 2! I won’t lie in that 100%ing it was kind of a pain, and… definitely not something I’m going to make the mistake of doing again, but between the combat, and the very fun side content, it’s not a decision I think I really minded in the end, and if I’m held at gunpoint and told to 100% another Yakuza game… I don’t think I’d end up having too much of a bad time. 8/10.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God I love 90s jank. There’s a tendency for games made in this era to be on the cusp of some genuinely fascinating ideas and go for them with all they’ve got… only for the technology of the time to not quite be enough to fully realize the ambition that went into it. This can result in… rough experiences, yeah, but oftentimes it’s a fun experience looking at them from a game design perspective and figuring out what exactly the developers were going for, even if they don’t quite add up in the end. This… type of experience went away around the mid to late 2000s — as indie games began to take prominence in the marketplace — but from the 90s to before then if you look hard enough you’ll find a full-on trove of games made my smaller studios which did their best to reach for the stars, no matter how limited their tools happened to be. And Bad Mojo — the sole game made by Pulse Entertainment before they moved on to more tech-related ventures — in particular, stands out as a pretty solid example of some of the creativity that came with FMV and adventure games during this time period.

You play as Roger, an entomologist planning on embezzling research money, ditching the city, and running off to Mexico to get bitches. On the night before his escape, however, Roger picks up an amulet which all of a sudden hits him with magic power and transplants his soul into the body of a cockroach. Now trapped in the basement of his apartment building, Roger must navigate his way back to his room, keep away from everything in the house that’s now capable of killing him, and uncovering… a way more complex plot than I was expecting for a game which premise is “you have become Gregor Samsa wdyd?” Like, it’s goofy and maybe a bit overcomplicated (like a lot of games of its ilk), but for a premise that can be a plot all on its own it’s… surprisingly psychological, and surprisingly dedicated to exploring and expositing on its characters. I wouldn’t necessarily call it a masterpiece of narrative, or something I’d specifically recommend the game for, but it’s certainly an interesting facet, and definitely something that helps contribute to this game’s charm.

What I’m most fond of, I think, is how novel the gameplay feels. You, in your roach form, use the arrow keys to navigate the apartment complex, and it… almost feels more like some kind of top-down platformer than an adventure game. You’re given rather large areas in which you’re encouraged to explore, and oftentimes your biggest challenge, more than anything, is to figure out where exactly you need to go, and in turn how you can get there. Your roach legs can get you anywhere so long as you can reach it, and most puzzles revolve around getting past a barrier or figuring out how to progress through a specific zone. I’m also a fan of how you, as a cockroach, interact with the environment. Liquids, such as oil or water, and slippery surfaces are potential death traps if you’re not careful enough with your movement, but should you stop moving, think about the situation, and refrain from panicking, you can often get back to a safe spot and avoid losing one of your lives. Creatures such as rats, cats, and spiders are enemies you have no meaningful defence against, and it’s either a matter of turning something in the environment against them or carefully maneuvering through an area to avoid them. There are also other details that are really cute: how often you can see other cockroaches scurrying to the place you’re coincidentally meant to go, or how often the 3D objects you climb up always seem to be on some sort of axis, meaning you never tend to go in a straight line, often twisting and turning around the shape as you scuttle up the table leg or bedframe. A lot of the focus of the gameplay is about really making you feel like Spider-Man a cockroach, and to that extent… it succeeds, and does kind of feel like nothing else I’ve particularly played.

I’m also really into the way the game blends CG and FMV, and how… seamless the overall artstyle feels. While there’s generally a split — gameplay segments being CG while story segments are FMV — it’s generally cool how elements from one can blend into the other, such as ‘real’ objects that do things in game when you interact with them, or greenscreening real actors into CG backgrounds. It’s not exactly something unique to this game — adventure games like Harvester or Darkseed had you play as FMV actors in a CG world — but this feels so much more seamless than the contemporaries I’ve seen: it never feels like the two separate artstyles are in conflict, and a lot of the transition shots between gameplay and story feel super clean. Beyond that, I’m just mostly a fan of the environmental design. The game just really captures the aesthetic of a run-down bar, from how all the clutter constantly lining the floor feels absolutely huge from the perspective of a cockroach, in addition to having some imagery which feels genuinely striking in just how yucky it feels, from all the corpses and the general super sorry state everything just seems to be in. There were points where I was kind of excited to see what exactly was placed on the next screen, whether it be a broken mirror, a... lovingly depicted rat corpse, or the messiest kitchen top I've ever seen. It's a real 'damn bitch, you live like this?' kind of experience, and the game nails that feeling perfectly.

I do think, however, that some of its aspects often come at the expense of each other. While the FMV backgrounds do look great, and aesthetically do a great job at showing off how awful it is, it sometimes makes it difficult to tell where the exact borderlines between surfaces are, often causing movement to feel like you’re getting stuck on nothing, or brute forcing against a surface until the game arbitrarily lets you through. Pushing things around with my head — the only way you can really interact with the world as a cockroach — always felt finicky, sometimes causing me to spend too much time trying to find the arbitrarily correct spot so that I could do what I was meant to do, or often making stuff like the fight with the spider (where you have to rotate a cigarette butt in a specific direction) much trickier than it was intended to be. You have tank controls, which… only exacerbated a lot of the above problems, often making getting a specific angle of direction much harder than it needed to be or often making me mess up when my goal was to rotate something. Even with the cockroaches (and cutscenes) guiding me vaguely in the direction I needed to go, the game… suffers from the same issues a lot of early adventure games do where it’s often not clear what you can or need to do, which can result in moments where without a walkthrough you just feel kind of aimless on where to go.

And those problems… definitely do suck, especially since a lot of these just feel like limitations of the time rather than legitimate oversights, and with something with this much passion and ambition behind it it does feel lame that it ultimately gets let down by itself, but even then, there’s plenty to at least recommend this game for. With a gameplay conceit that feels super unique, even today, and an artstyle that really seamlessly blends together two different graphical style — in addition to providing a striking and fitting aesthetic — Bad Mojo is a game unlike… a lot of others, and uses its abnormalities to stand out for the better. 7/10.

Smile For Me is a first-person 3D adventure game where you play as an unnamed florist visiting The Habitat, a weird group home with the mission statement of making you Happy again. However, the owner, a dentist named Dr. Habit, has done a remarkably poor job at actually helping the residents so far, so it falls to you to explore the Habitat, interact with its myriad residents, solve puzzles, and one-by-one, make all the residents smile again.

First off: I’m really into this game’s artstyle. It blends together a bunch of different things: a 3D environment, 2D sprites, analog stock footage cutscenes, and even utilizing Jim Henson-esque puppets, and yet it all feels like a consistent whole — with no area in particular bringing the rest down. And as for what does feel simple as far as gameplay loops go, I think it’s fun! I like how most of the traditional item-collecting and puzzle solving is mostly focused on interacting with the people around you — doing things for them, helping with their problems, which results in them providing you with items or giving you access to new areas as a reward for helping them out. It’s… not something I haven’t seen before in a more modern adventure game, but it’s a nice twist on the traditional formula (where often most of your puzzles/interaction dealt with the environment rather than the people in it) and a nice way of placing focus on what matters most here: the characters and the writing.

You meet a total of 20-25 people during your visit to the Habitat, all distinct and fun in their own unique way, and part of what I enjoyed most was finding out which weird and kooky character I’d meet next, or find out just what happened if I did something or showed them a particular item. Particular favourites, off the top of my head, were the guy who desperately wanted to smell like pickles (and whose puzzle you solve by just smashing him over the head with the jar of pickles he gives you) and the child who up and asked me to punch twenty people. The cast as a whole are fairly strong, and I like the way they’re balanced and kept relevant throughout the whole game — a lot of the earlier people you meet, for example, either can’t be made happy until later in the game, or are in some way involved in somebody else’s quest. There’s a couple people who are less memorable, and there’s a non-zero amount of them who slip through the cracks, but given that it’s a cast of 20+ people I’d still like to say that’s pretty impressive.

I’m also into what this game is doing under the surface with its writing. There’s a notable undercurrent of horror bubbling throughout, and the game does well at handling the balance without going too over the top with it. While there are hints from the beginning that not everything is as it seems, from all the little messages and videos that appear when you dream and just how suddenly foreboding it gets when night starts falling, the game never falls further into that territory until the final act, keeping a sign of what’s to come while never feeling like, say, a creepypasta game, or something that’s explicitly meant to be horror. I’m also interested in some of the stuff it has to say about happiness, and how that gets communicated through gameplay: how there’s no one way every single person can be made ‘happy’, how oftentimes you need to get to know a person before you can get to the heart of what they want, and how sometimes happiness can be fickle — making certain people happy via causing distress to others. It’s subtle, and you have to intuit it through playing the game, but it’s a cool thing to think about, and a neat example of communicating thematic messages through gameplay.

There are… a good amount of double-edged swords in this game, though. While it’s certainly cool to access more parts of the Habitat as you progress through the game — as a reward for and reminder of your progress — I do feel there’s a little bit of a problem with scope, with you receiving items and having no idea what to do with them because there’s so many items and so many places to use them and it’s tricky to figure out the one place you’re meant to use it. There’s a weird, fun logic to puzzles that can make the player feel clever for getting on the game’s wavelength, but it can just as easily kinda leave the player with no clue on what to do or what to interact with — something compounded with the above issue of scope. in addition, the game kinda felt… clunky, at points? Accessing the inventory and using items never felt particularly comfortable, especially as it started to grow and grow, and even by the end of the game I’d often just hold an item in my hands rather than use it like I wanted to. Sometimes I’d do things the game prompted me to do and it just wouldn’t register. In general items and puzzles felt a little finicky to play around, and oftentimes I'd just kind of stumble around without really knowing what it was I could do, and that was something… I pretty consistently felt, throughout the whole game.

But aside from those issues, I had fun with this! I don’t think it particularly breaks the mold of like, adventure games like this, nor do I think this as something I truly haven’t seen before, but I liked it! It’s a short-ish, cute game with some really good art and some pretty good writing and I’d say it’s totally worth your time to check it out yourself. 7/10.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This was a fun way to spend 15 minutes. The long and short of it is that you’re a guy in an empty office building tasked with removing all the ‘vermin’: which i.e mostly comes down to the player smashing everything in sight with a sledgehammer until you find and hit all the objects that bleed. There’s an addictive, kinda addictive arcadey feel, and the constraints that get added onto you as you go through each level add a level of complexity that forces you to think your approach on how you’re going to do a level, which is a neat bit of depth in a game that’s mostly “smash everything in sight.” I do think one later level had a gimmick that could’ve been split into two — especially given one achievement is “beat the game while only smashing vermin” — and the ending has the story take this weird, metaphorical beat which, while it’s interesting in how it contextualizes a lot of the game, I was loosely willing to accept the game on a surface level and didn’t think adding more complexity was particularly needed? Other than that, though, this is a neat 15-minute distraction which iirc is totally free. Check it out! 7/10.

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