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

This one’s maybe the most likely to a. be replayed and b. potentially move up in the midst of doing so — I’ll confess that maybe my feelings were impacted a bit since this was near the end of a marathon I was doing and I was feeling fairly exhausted. Either way, though, this was decent! I love the Commodore-64 aesthetic and how it combines with more modern techniques (in gaming, at least) like the rotoscoping during cutscenes — it really sells the unnatural feeling of the enemies you go up against and really helps contribute to the horror atmosphere. I also like the kind of… Goldilocks balance they have between committing to the technical limitations/difficulty of the era while not actively making it feel worse than it was back then: a lot of these throwback games tend to miss this balance and make the difficult mechanics of the time feel even worse, so it’s nice to see something that goes for this and feels… accurate, yet not unfair. I did have a major problem with signposting and knowing what I had to do — I needed to be backseated going through the whole thing and felt so aimless and tired when I wasn’t — but aside from that this was solid and decently fun. Maybe now that I know what I’m meant to do and maybe if this doesn’t come off the back of 6+ hours of other games I’ll have a bit of a better time with this when I eventually go to play the other two chapters. 6/10 for now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I really liked the original ObsCure! It doesn’t exactly push the envelope as far as survival horror goes, and there are… certainly issues (the final boss, for one), but it’s a fun, kind of goofy game that’s… kind of like a more fast-paced, multiplayer Resident Evil with the same sort of tone as a teen horror movie. What I really like about it is the little things it does that feel kind of unique to it. I love the focus around light weakening the monsters/zombies as a gameplay mechanic — it adds a whole new dimension into how you approach weapons and encounters, and that moment where the sun goes down and you can no longer break the windows to trivialize encounters is a really nice ‘oh shit’ moment. Permadeath is present, but totally optional: you can just load a save and the game gives more than you’re ever going to need. Most of all, I really liked the cast — both how they perfectly emulate their high school archetypes without feeling like cardboard cutouts and how each of them brings something gameplay-wise — differing stats, in addition to unique and (mostly) useful talents that make building your team of two a significant decision. Again, it’s… mostly derivative, aside from the little bits and bobs where it differentiates, but it’s fun and charming and it really hits all the right beats enough that as of writing this it honestly contends for being one of my favourite survival horror games.

ObsCure II, on the other hand…

The story follows three of the main characters of the previous game plus, like, four more new characters, as they try to move on from what happened at their high school and transition to college/adult life. However, everybody at college is obsessed with things like sex and smoking hardcore drugs, and when a new flower starts getting smoked around campus, the rampant sexual activity creates a super-STD that, on the night of a frat party, rapidly turns all the college students into bloodthirsty monsters. It becomes up to both the new and old characters to team up, kill some zombies, and… actually things just end there. You just kind of do things and then things happen. It’s one of those kinds of plots.

And I’ll give it credit, a lot of the skeleton that made the first game a blast is still present here. Most of all being that the game can still be played all the way through with a partner via local multiplayer — even if the game was otherwise a slog there’s still something in being there with a friend — but even then the gameplay is still fast, yet also loosely strategic at its core. Weapons all have different purposes and capabilities aside from the usual ranged/melee moniker, and some enemies benefit from taking a different approach to other enemies — broods, for example, requiring quick hits from a baseball bat to avoid getting overwhelmed, while brood mothers often require the prolonged damage of the stun gun or chainsaw to lock them down — and with how quickly you can draw and switch them, combat really does switch up for every encounter you’re in, which is pretty neat. I read on this one Steam guide that this was a deliberate choice so that there was more flow to combat and prevent players from just brute forcing enemies, and while I don’t… think they really got there (I think there’s room to actually make the game harder if they wanted to accommodate that better), it’s interesting to know how much lies beneath the surface in this area.

But while the skeleton’s still present, and kinda fun, all the little kinks it has that really take it up a level are… gone, and replaced with things that really don’t work as well. Permadeath is gone, and so is unlimited saving — replaced by pre-determined save points that only work once, disinclining you from fucking around and potentially making you replay lonnnnnnnng stretches of the game should you be so unfortunate to find out. The emphasis on the enemies being weak to light is… aside from one token room where you can use a searchlight just totally gone — no flashlights, no sunlight (despite you fighting the final boss in broad daylight), no real… anything, in that regard. Everything regarding strategy regarding picking your team has been replaced, too. For the most part, your team of two switches up every so often, and during the sections where you do get to pick… their abilities are now active talents required to solve puzzles, rather than little passive things that make them better at certain things, so if you happened to go all the way with one team and then find a lock you need to pick or a door you need to absorb the mold off, then… whoops, gotta backtrack alllll the way back to the start, and then alllll the way back to where you originally were just because the game mandates that you fight a boss with two specific characters, which… especially low-key sorta sucks, mostly because I remember the first game being really cool with varying cutscenes depending on who you’re playing.

The story is also… kind of yeesh. On one hand, it reads almost like a PSA in terms of how heavy-handed it is about how drugs and sex are BAD and will do bad shit to your body, but on the other hand… it also kind of treats those same subjects in this super leery way? It almost feels like a Friday the 13th movie in how the female characters are kind of shaped by sex appeal, and then it goes the extra mile and frames it like it's on them for being so sexy (like, genuinely, one of the character bios lists them as being ‘responsible for the suspicious stickiness of many a bed-sheet' as if it's her fault they’re jacking off?) and it just feels kind of yucky all around. Even beyond that… it’s just a very stupid plot that could be fun but is undermined by how seriously it expects the player to take it. Like, all these characters get introduced as fratty and vapid college students straight out of a Friday the 13th movie and then… suddenly expects me to feel pathos when they all get brutally killed (especially after one has more of a reaction to his crashed car more than his brutally murdered girlfriend)? You just place so much exposition about the backstory and the mystery and the plot when it’s primarily about what the game calls the ultimate STD? Like, at least a lot of other survival horror games with less amazing plots knew how to play it up and have fun with it, but this kind of plays it straight in such a dour way, which makes it harder to laugh with it rather than laugh at it.

And in the end… it’s at least a little bit sad how hard of a downgrade this game is from the original. Like, the core is still there, and it’s at least passable as a multiplayer zombie shooter, but when you sand off all the little things that made ObsCure feel unique... there really isn’t much left for us here. 5/10.

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

Knee Deep is a weird fuckin’ game.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ib is an RPG Maker horror game where you play as a girl named Ib, who tags along with her parents to go to an exhibition showcasing the works of little-known artist and sculptor Weiss Guerterna. However, when a wrong turn places her in a version of the gallery devoid of people, Ib finds herself going deeper and deeper — soon entering the paintings themselves. Now finding herself in a world where Guerterna’s art has seemingly been brought to life, and the inhabitants not quite friendly to outsiders, Ib must solve puzzles, progress further and further down into the gallery, and try to keep herself and the friends she meets across the way safe as they all try to find a way out.

For a game that ostensibly uses exhibition art as a throughline — from the location design still remaining reminiscent of an art gallery the further and further down you go, to the puzzles primarily requiring the player to interact with the artwork of the gallery — I think the visual design is really strong. The game uses… a rather subtle version of pixel art, with soft colours, a lack of outlines, and realistic proportions that blur the line between pixel art and something like a more traditional form of art. This even extends to the character sprites that appear on the side of the screen — it took me a while after beating the game to even realize that they were actually pixel art and not hand drawn, which feels kinda insane to me. I’m also super into whenever this artstyle suddenly gets changed up. It’s hard to really elaborate further given that most examples on that part are spoilers but whether it’s done either subtly or loudly it’s always done for some sort of effect or enhancement, and always with some measure of deliberateness behind it. There’s… one particular portion of the game where I wished they actually leaned harder into what they were doing, but aside from that I was super into how this game looks visually — it looks like it belongs as an RPGMaker horror game, but also not, and it’s really cool to see a game like this with a totally unique visual identity.

I also think… this game does a lot of what it’s doing well. Gameplay-wise, I’m really into a lot of the puzzle design: you effectively go through the gallery one room at a time, and are always completely done with a room by the time you move on to the next one, which always means the options you have are limited to what’s immediately around you and you never suffer from the 90s adventure game problem of having wayyyyyyy too many things you can interact with and having wayyyyyyy too many items you need to juggle and figure out the use for. I’m also into the puzzles themselves: while there are a couple stinkers in there I’m generally into how the game approaches problem-solving. While it does mostly focus on taking items and using them in certain places, the theming of the art gallery and the use of more abstract logic make it feel more like you’re trying to solve riddles that the game designer has prepared for you rather than just getting items to get more items. I also like how… lenient the game is compared to most RPGMaker horror games — your healthbar means that you can actually take a hit when things get actively dangerous/if something catches you off guard, though the limited opportunities to heal do provide a survival-horror sense of resource management, or making sure you avoid damage so that you can take it if need be.

Story-wise… it’s very much an RPGMaker horror game in that it has a story you can’t exactly talk about in distinct terms without spoiling it, but in general, I enjoyed the way the game was written! The characters all were likable or fascinating, and… there’s a low-key undercurrent of black comedy which doesn’t always pop up but generally ends up being pretty fun when it does — the storybook you read early on in the game, for example, really sells its whiplash in a way that crosses from horrifying to incredible. The horror beats generally work very well — there are some particular sections of the game that are very tense and do a good job of making the player feel absolutely helpless. I’m… also really into the way the game handles player choice and multiple endings. The player can make choices that shape the narrative and come back later on, but the endings themselves are determined by particular values and how they mesh together… values that, however, are shown by the choices the player makes. I’m a little sad because you can only see so much of it when you go through the game once (and two endings are locked off until you beat the game for the first time, which is >:( ) but as someone who really likes looking at how player choice shapes the narrative this game has a ton going on under the surface, and it’s really enjoyable to unpack it all and see how all the cogs in the machine work.

All in all… yeah, I definitely enjoyed Ib a lot! I’m not quite sure it quite hits the level of excellent, to me, but it’s a super cool 2-3 hour game that does a lot of cool things with its visual and game design and, in the field of RPGMaker horror games, really does a good job at standing out amongst the crowd, even with so much time passing since it’s release. 8/10.

My thoughts on Gunman Clive 1, in brief, is that it's, like, solid. It's a quick little game where you're a cowboy mega-bustering your way past bandits and bosses to save your wife. You run through levels, you pick up powerups. It's nothing really amazing but it doesn't need to be — it's a nice way to kill an hour or two on your 3DS when you're bored and don't really want to commit to a bigger game.

Gunman Clive 2... tries to be more than that — more mechanics, more spectacle. It... doesn't really work out all that well. The loose way I can describe it is... if it kind of went for quantity over quality. You know (well, you probably don’t, but whatever) how Gunman Clive had that one vehicle level which was a fun little change of pace that still kept consistent with what you'd been doing up until then? Well now a quarter of the entire game are vehicle levels which throw new shit at you and all control like ass. You know how when the first game brought in new mechanics they stuck around often just played a little bit with how you were already doing things? Here there are new mechanics that barge in, completely force you to change the way you play, then disappear right afterwards. It creates a really uneven experience, where you can't actually apply anything you learn because it's rendered moot by future levels. The original Gunman Clive allowed you to become better in order to combat the harder challenges up ahead — this game just keeps you at the same level, which makes the endgame a process of you throwing yourself against the wall trying to break your way through the new mechanics that keep getting introduced there as well.

And it's a shame, because the strengths of the original are still present here — I like the artstyle and music, combat against enemies and bosses remains a highlight, and there's a certain joy in figuring out the path of least resistance as you try a level over and over again... it's just that this time this game's particular flaws magnify the flaws of the original game: getting sent right back to the beginning of a level when you die is extra punishing when a lot of the individual levels are gauntlets — especially with the vehicle levels where you can't go faster than the game allows you to. Controls still aren't amazing, and get even worse when you have to re-learn them on the fly or there's a new fancy gimmick which requires preciseness in jumping the 3DS analogue stick isn't built for and the first game never required from you.

But in general, like, man, I really wanted to see the changes made as an improvement on the first game — I'm all for sequels that experiment rather than just being the same thing again — but given how a lot of the expansion is straight up a downgrade... I think if I wanna kill time for an hour but don't want to commit to anything bigger I'll just stick with Gunman Clive 1. 5/10.

I think the moment that's most emblematic of Sonic Forces as an experience is this one point where Shadow appears in a cutscene, All Hail Shadow begins to play, but before the lyrics can come in and all the buildup can pay off the song just ends and gets replaced with generic dramatic score.

I mean, that doesn't really get into how passive and boring the game feels to play but in terms of what's actively objectionable I think that's a good lead-in. The game teases so much in regards to celebrating the 25 years of Sonic but then proceeds to do absolutely nothing with it: nearly all the unique, varied baddies from Sonic's history come back, but they have barely any presence and are written out by the halfway point in favour of a new guy whose entire character is basically "i'm not owned! i'm not owned!!!!!!!!!" There's the premise of a Sonic game where the bad guy actually manages to win and where the good guys are on their back foot, but its attempts at taking that darker approach are just laughably edgy (sonic was tortured in Eggman's base for a year) and once again it eventually just centralizes around a villain who's just not that interesting and leaves Eggman, the actual main antagonist and final boss as an afterthought. The game promises a hybrid of 2D and 3D Sonic levels to directly follow up from Generations (the best Sonic game), butttttt every stage just ends up following the pattern of "start 3D ---> go 2D and never leave" unless its 2D from the start.

Which I think leads to why actually going through the levels just felt so boring. There's a whopping thirty total story stages, wayyyyy more than any other sonic game, and I think it's this level of quantity which leads to why the stages don't feel so quality. If the game focused on cutting down the number of stages to make each one larger and more frenetic and fun to play then maybe there'd be something here, but instead every stage lasts like two minutes and the ones that don't stand out for good reason. It's less actively unfun, but... man did I absolutely get nothing out of the gameplay here. It just felt so passive.

There's... minor upsides, though. Namely with the OC. It was way more fun than it should've been to design my very own Sonic character and the way you consistently get new bits of clothing means you're constantly in the design booth touching up your character making it look like the most cursed thing it can be. Linking unlocking new clothes to getting higher ranks on the stage is a great motivator to replay stages (or at least it would if the stages were fun), and overall it's a great innovation that really helps give this game a little bit of identity among the blandness. I hope SEGA brings it back for whatever the next game is.

But overall... bleh. Not really a recommendation. Just... incredibly boring gameplay which takes every good thing it has for it going in and manages to mess it up. There are some interesting things in here, but otherwise... 4/10.

man what is it with indie developers and thinking 'story about a relationship that went sour narrated by the man' is in any way unique or subversive

Like, okay, I'll give the game some things. The art direction is gorgeous — a core and actually distinct theme in this otherwise trite story is that both parties involved are artists and view the world through the lens of art and while the conversations themselves don't have a lot of worth (i want a fridge that's sideways instead of vertical because i'm quirky xd! this is the part in the story where we're deliriously happy with one another so that when juxtaposed with the very next chapter when we hate each other and break up this'll ring as bittersweet in hindsight) the visual of the drawing slowly coming together was mesmerizing and really did sell me on the game's art direction. I also was interested in the central conceit of the gameplay — messing with the maquette to make objects bigger or smaller, breaking through the boundary of the world to make yourself smaller is conceptually interesting, but in practice the game doesn't teach you any of its mechanics which made me have to check the walkthrough frequently to know where the puzzle even was and to see what obscure mechanic from two chapters ago was being brought back and many of the solutions themselves were fraught with slowness, tedium, and brute-forcing against the game's physics engine until things arbitrarily worked. Always frustrating, never really fun.

I would've maybe given this game a borderline pass if one of its aspects really worked beyond the conceptual level, overall, but between a story that's not as distinct as it thinks it is and puzzle gameplay that should work more than it actually does, art design and presentation are only barely enough to stop this game from being bad. 4/10.

Time travel stories are… tricky to write.

Mostly because the mechanics of time travel itself are so easy to mess up. The idea of going to a time period that you don’t belong to, interfacing with events that have already happened, running the risk of changing the future with your actions… it’s a lot of little considerations running under the surface every time a character is like “let’s go back to the past : D” and it’s very easy to miss even one of them and have your story become much more clunky. A good amount of time travel stories make this work by just not giving a shit — embracing the contradictory, messy nature of time travel and just kind of shrugging most of its implications off. Other time travel stories try to solve these issues by placing a great deal the “rules” of time travel, and while doing this right can result in neat, self-contained stories, doing this wrong, can, well…

So Shadow of Destiny follows the story of this guy named Eike who is enjoying his afternoon walk when suddenly the wind stabs him in the back and kills him. He then encounters a supernatural being named Homunculus, who grants Eike the ability to time travel in the hopes that he can stop his own untimely death. It becomes clear though, however, that death seems to be following Eike as he goes about his day, and the player must move Eike around the city, travel through different time periods, and solve inventory puzzles both to uncover the mysteries surrounding the story, and to delay your own death for just another half hour…

In theory, it works. I’m a fan of how the story is presented. The way it functions is that as you travel through time and explore the city of Lebensbaum, there are differing ways that you can solve puzzles and progress through the game. Through taking these differing paths, the story takes different directions, and the clues Eike (and through that, the player) receives is never quite everything you need, which is a neat way of uncovering the in-game mysteries presented to you. This mechanic is further extended by the ending, where — depending on a choice made in the 5th chapter and the method you complete the 8th chapter — you can receive one of five endings, each of which solve one aspect of the mystery… while still leaving you in the dark about others. It’s a cool way to handle a story built on multiple overarching mysteries, and, in theory, it’s a great incentive to replay the game and give yourself the full picture.

I also like the general artstyle, and how it helps to characterize each of the time periods you go through. Each version of Lebensbaum you run around has a different layout owing to how the city has changed throughout history, and this is represented by each time period having a radically different colour palette attached to it. This both helps to indicate the main characteristics of each time period — the early 1900s being in black-and-white given the recurring motif of photography, as an example — and to help immediately show the differences between each time period as you enter them, providing a throughline for the main strength of the time travel mechanic. Seeing locations, the characters you meet, and even the city itself change as you run around through time is a super strong concept — both seeing the origin points of familiar locations and interacting with different versions of the same character. Even better, in theory, is how the things you do can radically change parts of the future, providing another layer to the adventure game gameplay and, theoretically, creating some cool solutions to puzzles.

I say 'in theory' a lot, though, in regards to talking about the positives of this game, and that’s mostly because while there’s stuff that’s super cool on paper… the truth is that this game is a total mess and mostly only has its concepts to back it up. The big issue, in regards to this, is that it’s an adventure game, and like most subpar adventure games, the puzzles operate on a level that… isn’t exactly intuitive or entirely logical. Even beyond the usual issue where often a walkthrough feels required in order to figure out what you’re meant to do, the way the puzzles interface directly with the plot often just makes the plot seem… a lot more stupid than intended.

Like, here’s an example: you’re talking with this waitress, and right as the conversation ends, you get stabbed by your assassin, out of sight because of the giant tree behind you. You get sent back to the moment before you have the conversation, and, with the knowledge you have, are now tasked to prevent your death from happening. Now, you might think the obvious solution is to, say, avoid being in the area in the first place, or get away from the tree as soon as possible, or anything kind of obvious, but that’s not the solution the game puts forward. See, what you actually have to do is have an identical conversation with the waitress (like, seriously, the cutscene is the exact same as the first time), go back in time to the 1500s (fucking taking the waitress with you), scare some puritans away with your mobile phone, and convince the guy planting the tree that you’re actually the local lord so that he’ll never plant the tree, which, when you go back to the present (leaving the waitress in the past without a second thought), stops the assassin from killing you because ??? and lets you go further into the game. And, like, I get that there needs to be a puzzle and stuff, but you can still, like, hit that balance of making your core mechanic of different time periods feel meaningful while also not completely undercutting the plot with all the dumb stuff you have to do to progress it. Because, like, what I put up there? The second puzzle. And it keeps getting more stupid from there.

But even then, juxtaposed with the… insanity of the puzzles, the story is mostly just… boring? My gameplay experience mostly came down to “die, go back to the time period the game tells you to, walk somewhere, sit through a five-minute cutscene, do some stuff, get hit with another five-minute cutscene” and often it felt like the game would just stop in its tracks to deliver a super dry, uninteresting conversation about stuff that ultimately I don’t think actually matters to the story (like, to the point where I’m pretty sure only two of the five time periods actually matter to the grander plot?). The cutscenes that deliver plot-relevant information, in the meantime, are all wrapped in this layer of garbledegook that makes things feel complicated and incomprehensible and not in a particularly fun way — more that it was making me have trouble figuring out what was going on until nearly the very end where all the fat gets trimmed and things are finally explained to you. I’d be more down with the stupid stuff with the puzzles if it was consistently like that the whole way through (a la Knee Deep) but when it keeps getting interrupted with dry, elongated cutscenes insisting you try to take it super seriously… it’s a diptych that does neither half favours, and getting pulled so hard in both directions just makes the overall experience inconsistent and not particularly great.

There’s more in terms of things I didn’t particularly like — your time travel works on a fuel system and how this ends up working out is that you are scouring Lebensbaum to try and find the pellets you need to continue the story while you desperately hope you haven’t accidentally softlocked yourself — but I’ve been spending too long trying to write this game up and I wanna just finish it. tl;dr… Shadow of Destiny is certainly an interesting game, and there’s certainly a universe where the mechanics it has on paper work out… but in practice, between the stupid puzzles and the boring, incomprehensible plot the game, while not particularly unpleasant to play, is too muddied and out there to feel anywhere near good. 4/10.

Honestly, after all the varied and actually-kinda-fun-in-a-bad-way games I've played I've come to realize even more that the absolute worst thing you can be is boring.

Because, like, even if you're a complete and total failure in basically every way it's still at the very least for me a worthwhile experience just to see where exactly things go wrong. It's personally fun for me — even if the actual game isn't fun to play — to look at the aspects of bad things as I go along to try and figure out why specifically, it doesn't work, and how it could be improved or whether it could've been good in another game or circumstance. There's a lot of ways to learn what to do through seeing how something falls, and something with no 'good' elements can still be educational so long as you're willing to look from a bit of an analytical lens, and also still have fun even if it's more at the game's expense.

It can't, however, if the most you can really say about a game is that it's... really dull, more than anything.

I mean, it's possible to place emphasis on how the game dives headfirst into the worst aspects of 90s adventure games with too many items (especially ones that you don't ever actually use on anything) and mechanics that the player can use at a time, really confusing puzzles that no-one in their right mind would be able to intuit, and game design where it's very easy to softlock and render the game unwinnable if you don't know exactly what's coming, but even then it's not especially egregious in a way other bad adventure games aren't. You could talk about how Jack Orlando is just a really unlikeable protagonist who antagonizes near everyone he meets, but, like, aside from near the beginning he isn't even an asshole in a fun way — he's just dour and randomly rude and actively bigoted at points and it fucking sucks to play as him. The plot theoretically, is absolutely ludicrous and stupid, but because it's a noir it just takes itself so serious and dour the entire time — you just talk to greyscale characters and then talk to greyscale characters sifting through dialogue that's absolutely dull and aside from a couple of moments which are hilarious it's just... dull. It's boring. I played this game with friends and nearly all of them left before the end because absolutely nothing was happening.

And that's the main reason why I consider Jack Orlando to be among the worst games I've played. I've played through boring before, but generally at the very least those games are at least competent enough in some aspect that they're able to just be mediocre and not actively bad. I've played through bad, but at the very least most bad games are bad in a way that makes them worthwhile/educational. Jack Orlando, though, hits the Venn Diagram where none of its aspects really work at all but also aren't really all that fun to see how they fail — this is just a game where you trudge through a dry and monotonous 1930s prohibition-era noir plot trying to exonerate and give this actively awful person his redemption while you basically have to follow a walkthrough because there are so many items that are there and do nothing and so many puzzles that don't have a clear solution at all and so many ways that you can get softlocked into a bad ending because of this design. It's a slog, more than anything else, and given how the game... really doesn't have anything going for it?

Yeah. 1/10. I wouldn't even say, like, watch a video to see what this game has to offer without spending your money — you really do just get nothing out of this.

So I’ll fully confess: until I played Silent Hill for the first time, I never actually knew what all those ‘PSX retro horror’ indie games were actually drawing inspiration from, aesthetically. Like, I’d seen games on the Playstation before, but never anything that really… looked like what these people were going for. Even now that I’ve played it, I still feel that there’s a pretty clear distance between how PSX games look and how these throwback indie titles look, and I think at least a little of that is mostly due to intention: while the retro throwback games adapt this style and tend to exaggerate it in order to simulate an idea of what games looked like during that time, Silent Hill’s graphics which… seem legitimately an attempt to push the envelope of the time, with touches added to fight technical limitations and issues. I’ve always stressed that there’s a difference between ‘graphics’ and ‘artstyle’ — and that while there’s always been a push for graphical fidelity I’ve always felt artstyle to be more important, both to establish visual identity and to age the game well a generation down the line — and Silent Hill, to me, represents that balance quite well, blending (at the time) cutting-edge graphics with a distinct and memorable artstyle that still produces fans and imitators, even over twenty years down the line.

You play as Harry Mason, who, after a car crash, wakes up in the strange town of Silent Hill without his daughter (seven years old, short black hair, her name is Cheryl, she’s his daughter) by his side. He soon finds that the town is filled with mist and monsters, and, even worse, as he traverses through locations in an attempt to find his daughter, he finds the presence of the Otherworld — the ground below his feet changing at what seems like a whim to expose the true evil underneath the place. Armed with a map, a gun, and a revolving cast of residents and fellow outsiders, Harry must figure out what exactly lies at the centre of the Otherworld, save his daughter, and escape the town of Silent Hill alive.

I’ve heard that a lot of games in the golden era of survival horror often worked to mask their technical issues, or turn them around so that these limitations instead work in the game’s favour, and the original Silent Hill exemplifies this ethos to great effect. The fog that permeates the overworld — allegedly placed to hide issues with the rendering distance — works both to provide an eerie, unearthly aesthetic to the town, and also allows the player to enter Harry's shoes a little bit and feel how he feels. Because the fog covers up nearly everything beyond a couple metres of you — and given just how large and long the roads are — you never quite know where you are even if you know where you’re going, forcing the player to constantly check the map in order to figure out your position compared to everything else, which super simulates the feeling of desperately trying to navigate but just being lost in all the fog and unfamiliar landscape around you.

Speaking of maps: I really like how important navigation is! The various maps you pick up over the course of the game are required tools to traverse Silent Hill, and Harry is often forced to get out his red pen to point at potentially important places or cross out places he can’t traverse, be it because of a locked door or a fallen apart bridge, updating the map and making both the player and Harry have to figure out where it is they’re capable of going. I also kinda like the way realism blends in with this mechanic — you get maps for, say, the hospital and the tourist area fairly quickly given that these areas would have maps laying around (I love how you also just take the hospital’s map from off the wall, too, that’s a fun little detail) but for a place like the sewers, or the final area, where the map isn’t quickly or easily available, figuring out how exactly to navigate the place becomes as much of an objective as what you’re actually meant to be working towards. Once you’re in the Otherworld, too, using the map becomes more tricky and unreliable due to how similar yet different the Otherworld is compared to the place you actually have the map for, often causing the player to go for stretches without knowing where they are or forcing them to mentally rearrange the map to fit where they actually are. I also happen to be a fan of how the Otherworld is… mostly just a straight shot to where you need to go, as compared to the normal world’s puzzles and locked doors — it’s a nice contrast that means you’re never doing the same sort of thing for too long. As a continual game mechanic and thing the player has to work around, I really do like the way Silent Hill places emphasis on using the map and figuring out your path through the town.

Gameplay wise, it’s… surprisingly solid? Nothing I’d truly write home about, but there are some neat touches that do a good job of standing out and characterising the experience. The presence of the fog complicates combat in the overworld in a nice way: enemies tend to be high-mobility and jump in and out of your vision, often cutting off your visual on them and forcing you to listen out to figure out where exactly they’re going to come back in so you can preempt them with a gunshot or a well-timed melee hit. The radio — which automatically starts crackling whenever you’re in the presence of a monster — does a good job at amping up the tension in the gameplay, as it gives you just enough info to know something’s coming up, but fails to tell you exactly where or what it is, leaving the player wondering when the foe they know is there is going to appear, or even if it’s going to appear at all (and I love the beat when you’re in the sewers and the radio doesn’t work — it’s a fun bit of realism and it really helps to make enemies catch you off guard and put you on your back foot). I’m also into the way the music characterises the whole experience. While sometimes it can be distracting hearing somebody lay down a beat when you’re traversing through an area, I love the sharp contrast between industrial and melancholy that the soundtrack as a whole evokes, with hard sounds defining the combat and navigation through the Otherworld while the story is scored by soft, lush pieces that help to underlie the low-key tragedy of it all. My impression is that it's the soundtracks to the two Silent Hill games following this one that have the soundtracks everybody raves about, but even then I liked what I heard from this — enough to maybe give a listen outside the context of the game.

While I do like how some of the technical limitations help to characterise and improve the overall experience, there are other things, however, that… maybe don’t work as well. I’m not particularly a fan of the tank controls — it’s kind of finicky to try to get Harry through/into certain spaces and interact with certain things, and it often means you never have any true control over the exact direction Harry runs, which… both feel like things the player has to deal with throughout each area as opposed to things that naturally compliment the game’s strengths. There’s a weird tempo to the usual survival horror routine of resource management: while the beginning and end of the game are very happy to just dump ammo and health onto you, this cannot be said about the middle section, creating an awkward period where I was surprised to run low because I was expecting the frequency the rest of the game had, and then once I started getting lathered with things I was caught off guard again and never tended to use them because I had grown used to utilising other options for combat. Bosses… aren’t exactly winners, and while it’s a little less of an issue here since this isn’t a game that relies on action setpieces it is sad to see the little complexities of regular combat get taken away in exchange for spamming your ammo/health and damage racing the boss.

But those are just varying degrees of issue for what’s mostly otherwise a pretty fun time! This was one of the standout games in the golden age of survival horror for a reason: it managed to turn around the technical limitations of the time to its benefit and, as a whole, still remains a very fun game today just by virtue of the little things that define and characterise the entire experience, compared to its contemporaries at the time and all the other games it inspired down the line. 8/10.