Iron Lung is a game where you pilot a submarine through an ocean of blood on an alien moon, instructed to traverse the seafloor and take pictures of landmarks. As you cannot see outside the ship, barring taking photos, most of what you do is push buttons on the submarine controls, watch the coordinates go up and down, cross-check them with the map to approximate where you are, and it’s… surprisingly super engaging? Even before the horror elements set in, there’s a lot of fun in plotting where you’re going to go, figuring out how to get there, and dealing with all the obstacles along the way — every time I had to navigate my way through a tunnel felt genuinely tense, but when I managed to make it through to the other side I felt… honestly pretty excited for having been able to do that. The game also does a fairly excellent job at slow-building for something that’s only 90 minutes long, and the retro aesthetic, rustic colours, and the… unique premise create an atmosphere that carries and characterizes the whole experience. All in all… yeah, I’d say this is pretty great. Easily the winner of all the games I played on Halloween. 8/10.

Dead Space is a game in which you play as Isaac Clarke, an engineer, responding to a distress call on a spaceship from his wife. Upon reaching the ship, he quickly finds the reason for the distress call: strange creatures are being created from all the dead bodies on the ship and are attacking everything in sight. It becomes up to Isaac to try to combat the problem and find a way off the ship, fighting off the Necromorphs on every front that arises. However, as things progress, it becomes clear that more is as it seems on the U.S.G Ishimura, and between the many factions vying over the possession of the mysterious Red Marker, the psychological toll of the situation, and the ship itself falling apart at the seams, making it out alive starts to become more and more unlikely…

The core gameplay loop… really works in how simple it is. It plays mostly like your average over-the-shoulder third-person shooter, though with a twist: the Necromorphs don’t play by user shooter rules, but instead must be dismembered limb-from-limb in order to be put down for good. This… is a really neat twist on the shooter gameplay, and it's really fun having to retrain yourself to go for the neck or arms instead of the head. Later enemy types (and weapons, though there are some issues here I’ll get into momentarily) often require different approaches and strategies in order to take down, and it's really cool to have to think on your feet to try and stay alive, especially with how the game really likes to throw hordes at you. In any other game, it’d get frustrating, but here, it’s a challenge you’re always rearing to face, and a really good way of showing how this game blends action with survival horror.

I’d also really like to shout out this game’s aesthetic and just how hard it commits to it. There’s an effort made to make every element of the UI (such as your HP, the map, the shop, etc.) something represented in-game, rather than an element located outside of it, such as a health bar, or a map that pauses the game when opened. This does a lot, both to make the game experience seamless (even with the occasional loading screen in-between chapters) and to immerse the player into the aesthetic they’re presenting of this… mostly rustic future. Like Alien, the future presented is grimy and industrial — with brown and grey being favoured colours — and you can see the working parts and veins of the ship as you walk around, which is a contrast to the sleek, bright spaceships of most science fiction. It’s an art style that… still really holds up today, and really shows just how much aesthetics can contribute to a game’s mood and tone.

There are… issues, though. While the core gameplay of going through the ship and fighting the necromorphs is consistently excellent, a lot of the other gameplay elements… aren’t. Between platformer zero-gravity segments where its hard to know where you’re meant to go or where you’re allowed to jump, boss fights which mostly just consist of walking out the way of easy-to-dodge attacks while waiting forever for the boss to open up its weakpoints, and turret segments which legitimately hurt my arm while I was playing them, I was pretty consistently annoyed whenever I got pulled away from the stuff I liked to do, especially given how these sections invariably ended up worse than whatever I was doing before. I also feel like there was an issue with the amount of ammo I’m given? The way it works is that you (theoretically) only get ammo for the guns you have, which means that if you only have one or two you’re always going to be having ammo for them, while if you have three or four, you’re going to have scarcely any ammo for any of them. This… is a bit rough. It effectively disincentivizes you from using multiple guns, which… in a game where a lot of the core combat requires you to change your approach for each different enemy that arises, not having any reason to use any of the varied and potentially useful weapons against them seems like that front could’ve been expanded even more.

But even then, I really like the core gameplay of this enough to be able to shrug off most of the bad stuff. While there were sections that kind of sucked, the aesthetically pleasing and low-key deep setting/story and the sheer fun in managing resources and dealing with the necromorphs still make it clear that this is a survival horror classic, even today. 8/10.

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

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

Oh well

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve always felt like choice-based games get a bit of an unfair reputation.

And I’m not really sure how much of it is warranted or not. While the critique of “your choices don’t matter” levied ever since Telltale’s The Walking Dead came out is… certainly fair in regards to how a lot of games try to handle player choice, I do feel like at least a little bit of it is gamers hearing the phrase “your choices shape the narrative” and stretching it way beyond what would actually be feasible. Like, it's true that maybe games bottleneck you into the same setpieces/results regardless of what you do… but also the alternative requires wayyyyyyyy more scale than is even possible for a lot of these developers. As a fan of these sorts of games, it’s… mostly just an unwritten rule that there’s only so much a game can really branch out, and that when a game is truly capable of accounting for what the player does, it’s something special.

Until Dawn is one of those games.

The story follows eight young adults, one year after a prank caused the untimely deaths of their friends Hannah and Beth Washington. When the group is invited by Josh, the brother of the two deceased, to come back to the cabin where they died and celebrate their anniversary, as a method of commiserating and also moving on. However, it soon becomes clear that there’s some sort of malevolent force hunting down and attempting to kill the party, and it's up to you, the player, to take control of each character, go through QTE segments, make choices, and determine whether everybody dies, or manages to survive until dawn.

And… man, when this game says your choices matter, they really do. There are limits, obviously — the plot itself mostly goes down the same path and there are some characters who’ll stick around longer before they have a chance to die — but in regards to having the choices you make cause rifts and have repercussions down the line. Things that seem innocuous in the moment might come back later to make survival that much harder — if not just kill them outright. You’re even given a certain amount of leeway to determine what the characters are like: you can have jock Mike be the Ash Williams of the game… or you can have him be a total weenie who gets his ass kicked every time it's up to him to step up to the plate. You can have Emily and her rebound Matt bond together and have some genuinely cute moments together… or have them bicker at each other the whole way in a sea of pettiness. The possibilities… aren’t endless, but there’s a lot you can do, and for a game to be able to reach that sort of scale is honestly pretty incredible. I can’t stress that enough.

There’s… not really a lot that holds it back, honestly, though the bits that do are there and present and definitely knock it down a little bit. I say ‘bits’ when really the main one I want to talk about are the Don’t Move segments. See, in addition to QTEs (which… I’m fine with though I do wish certain life-or-death situations weren’t based on them), there are also other segments where you’re made to hold the controller and keep it absolutely still (because the PS4 controller has a motion sensor in it), causing you to fail if you move the controller outside the zone you started the event in. This is… kind of a fun way to implement motion controls in theory, but… it's very unforgiving. The zone you’re given is very small, to the point where even breathing can move you enough to make you fail which… as someone who gets muscle twitches is very rough but even regardless of that it's very easy to fail in a way that doesn’t feel like it's your fault. I can assume that this was a complaint for many both because I’ve seen a lot of people talk about it and also because I know how heavily nerfed they were in The Quarry (though that might just be because not every console has motion sensors), but it's sad to see something that… genuinely could’ve been a fun twist on the QTE formula work out as badly as it does.

…I realize, now that I’m this far into the review, that Until Dawn is… a bit of a hard game to review. Both because at least a little bit of it is wrapped up in spoiler stuff (tl;dr the story does a thing that’s spoilers that’s also a thing I absolutely love to see in fiction) but also a lot of what makes it work so well is… less in how it plays more in how it unfolds, which kind of makes it hard to describe for a text review like this. I’m not generally fond of seeing reviews that are just vague “try it, you won’t regret it,” but… if you’re into stuff based around player choice and you’re willing to look past sometimes iffy teen-movie writing and rough motion controls I really recommend you check this out. It’s one of the best Telltale-esque adventure games out there. 9/10.

And also, since one of my friends asked, here’s my character ranking of the eight teens, top to bottom best to worst:

Mike — easily one of the most malleable characters in terms of how you can portray him which is fascinating to see. I love my absolute loser <3
Emily — kind of loosely fun but mostly there for the first half of the game but once chapter 7 hits god she just steals the show. her shoving Ashley through the door <3
Josh — gets some of the most… weird 40-year-old-writing-teenager-lines but I’m really into how he’s portrayed and what he does in the plot
Chris — he’s generally fun and I like his relationship with Ashley, nothing much to say here he’s pretty cool
Jessica — sadly is out of focus for most of the game but I loved her before she ended up disappearing, she gets so many fun moments
Ashley — a bit too low-key of a personality but I like her general vibe and her relationship with Chris
Matt — has the same issue as Jessica but sticks out more because he has less of a personality
Sam — has the same issue with Matt in terms of personality but sticks out more because she's around the whole game

It’s really cool to see how sometimes games can be so popular and influential that they forever change how their genre is viewed from then on out.

Like, take how Hollow Knight influenced indie metroidvanias, for example. There are exceptions, obviously — and I can’t claim that I really know everything about the genre — but pre 2017 most of the prominent metroidvanias I saw were… primarily based on Castlevania, down to stuff like RPG-esque stats and gear (where you could walk over anything if you grinded enough) and a plot which… more than anything was mostly just a reason for your character to be walking around your castle sandbox. Enter Hollow Knight, with its mechanics primarily inspired by Dark Souls (which is at least a bit funny, given the degree to which Dark Souls was inspired from Castlevania even beyond the Metroidvania-like map) and suddenly every indie metroidvania after has bonfires as save points, an oblique plot which focuses more on putting individual bits of lore together to get a full picture, and combat that’s pattern based, punishing, and a lot more based on player skill than anything else. It’s a clear Before and After sort of thing, and Hollow Knight is the dividing line that’s basically come to define a lot of what’s around it.

And for good reason! Hollow Knight is a very good game!

The short of what you do in Hollow Knight is simple: you play as a little bug thing and you platform around the fallen kingdom of Hallownest, striking your nail at every single enemy in your way. Along the way, you pick up things like upgrades and items that give you the opportunity to access new enemies, fight its greatest foes, and figure out the mystery that lies at its core. You can also ignore all of that and do whatever you want — something I’ve learned this second go around is that if you already know what to do you can avoid bogging yourself down in the details and still have fun just exploring and going down your completion checklist. The benefit of Souls-like plots is that while there’s a ton of cool stuff to unpack if you’re interested in excavating through the vagueness… you can also choose not to opt into it and instead just pick a direction and walk. The world is open enough that you’ll still make progress no matter what random direction you go in, and generally the game’s good enough at signposting where you’re capable of going that you’re never going to be stuck wondering what you’re meant to do.

And there’s a lot you can do.

Like, seriously. I don’t want to act as if indie games aren’t allowed to have content or anything, but I’d honestly say that there’s more to do here than in games with dev teams twenty times the size. Hallownest is vast, and behind every corner is something for you to do, be it getting money or fighting a new boss or finding a new charm or item or spell or even just finding a cute little caterpillar for you to free. There are a lot of different stones to turn, and nothing ever feels like you’re repeating yourself — even by the end when you’re clearing old areas out you have so many new things at your disposal that its a far different experience than when you were going through it for the first time. Beyond that, the world is so pretty. Not just in terms of artstyle, but in terms of design: each little sound, each enemy, each biome you step into for the first time is so distinct from the last, and a lot of the joy you’ll have experiencing this game for the first time is just kind of uncovering this world and seeing what lies within.

Speaking of enemies, I love the combat in this game. It’s simple — all in 2D, and only one primary weapon, so you get used to your nail pretty quick — but there’s enough variety with all the different bosses and enemy types that allows for deeper appreciation of its mechanics. In addition, all the spells, Nail Arts, and charms you can find just through exploration of Hallownest each provide their own little dimension that allows you to create a build and a strategy for whatever might be facing you down. Finding a boss too oppressive to heal against? Pick charms that protect you and make your heal quicker so that you don’t have to lose the damage race. Striking a boss with your sword too unsafe? Just get a fucking army of little critters to chip away at them from afar and use the mana you gain from them to pepper it with spells. In addition, (most) bosses are… tough, yet ultimately simplistic in their design. While they can be tricky (yet also incredibly fun) fights, the focus on giving them tells and patterns means that you can learn their movesets sooner rather than later, and make sure that (nearly) no boss can majorly roadblock a player.

One last little thing in particular I’d really like to shout out is the way that Hollow Knight teaches players its mechanics. I’m a little bit hesitant to bring up… intuitive tutorializing, I think it’s called? mostly because every single time someone tries to analyze how a game intuitively teaches the player its mechanics all it really does is make the player look like a baby who hasn’t played a video game before, but I think Hollow Knight does it pretty well. This ties in with atmosphere, a little bit, because I think one of the coolest things the game does is not sacrifice its tone to tell the player something blatantly. There are in-game tutorials, yes, but they’re used sparingly, and have in-universe conjunction — you learn how to use special abilities at the same time the Knight does, as an example. Otherwise, you’re effectively alone in this huge, sprawling, dangerous world, and it's up to you to check the wiki figure out what you can do and how you’re meant to do it, and the game — particularly the tutorial area, with the doors you have to break down and the passive enemies and your first exposure to shortcuts — is really good at getting you to figure out a thing, solve the immediate problem, then let you realize how exactly you can reapply your knowledge later.

The game… isn’t without its issues, though. They’re small, but they’re present enough to make a negative impact, and keep Hollow Knight from quite being at the level of masterpiece. A lot of the bosses later on in the game (particularly the upgraded versions of previous bosses) tend to try and up the ante by making these bosses do double damage, which… I feel was not a great decision, both because the reduced amount of mistakes you’re allowed to make feel a lot cheaper and because oftentimes these refights bring enough new to the table that making it more arbitrarily stronger feels redundant. While I do appreciate the healing mechanic, binding it to the same mana meter as spells makes the latter feel obsolete even despite their potential strength — especially given how Nail Arts, as an equivalent, are freely usable and not bound to any sort of meter. While the map system is absolutely cool, I think things like the compass taking up an equipment slot and not being able to see where you are in an area until you have a map make exploration or going through the runup to a boss a little more annoying than intended. And speaking of that… yeah boss runups are here just like they are in the Souls games and they’re irritating — it feels tedious to have to sometimes traverse halfway across the area again and oftentimes taking damage makes you feel annoyed more than anything, as it means you’re that much weaker when you’re just hoping that this’ll be the try that you get the boss right.

But ultimately… those are just little issues in terms of what this game has to offer. Between the beautiful and atmospheric world, the simple yet complex combat, and the fact that you can go anywhere in this world and still feel like your decision was worth it… this game basically changed the perception of what metroidvanias could be in 2017, and for good reason. Five years, and two playthroughs, later, it still sets the benchmark for what one of these games should be. 9/10.

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

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

I just wish it was actually fun to play.

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

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

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

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

Okay, I can’t in good conscience claim that Harvester has aged all that well — especially compared to some of its 90s adventure game contemporaries — but man, does it truly do a lot for a game from 1995. To me it’s loosely the true definition of a guilty pleasure: something I legitimately like and will defend, as opposed to, say, something I like ironically or something I like for how bad it is. It mostly just comes down to how Harvester feels like… honestly like nothing else I’ve played before. It’s prone to misfiring on some of its ideas, and there are major aspects of gameplay that… I’ll get to later, but as a whole it’s an absolutely fascinating game that, for an early adventure game, does feel ahead of its time in certain aspects and doesn’t have any other particular comparison point today.

You play as an (alleged) teenager who wakes up with absolutely no memory of who or where he is. Through interacting with your NPC family and following where they lead you, you get filled in — your name is Steve, you live in the beautiful small town of Harvest, and you’re scheduled to get married to your sweetheart Stephanie next week. However, upon visiting the bride-to-be, you find out that, like you, Stephanie is also an amnesiac, and the two of you realize that there is something deeply up with the town of Harvest. To try and solve its mysteries, and to try and find a way out for you and Stephanie, you decide to investigate The Order of the Harvest Moon: an exclusive club that the town of Harvest seems to revolve around, and, as you attempt to join so you can enter the building, Steve finds himself participating in trials built to tear the town apart, and test just how far he can go over the edge.

And I’d just love to state how immensely I love this game’s vibe. Nearly every NPC you meet gives off the aura, of, like, some person who sits next to you on the bus who won’t stop talking about the weirdest shit who you wanna try and humour at first even though you’re a bit uncomfortable but who rapidly brings the conversation to bad territory to the point where you wanna get away from them as soon as possible and it really helps to give this game this surreal, disturbing… but also fun vibe, in a black-comedy sort of way. There are people who come off more relatively normal… but your actions either drive them away or show them to be as off-kilter as the rest of the town — which does an excellent job at making things escalate through the game and showing the effect of what you’re doing. This all seems to have an end goal of satirizing 50s small-town America and exposing what's beneath the idyllic exterior, and to that end, I think it works. While there are beats that I wish had more thought put into them (I preferred stuff like the firefighters over ‘all the natives are drunk and homeless’) I… genuinely liked figuring out what the game was going for thematically, and combined with generally sharp and fun writing nearly across the board, this game… very much delivers, story wise.

And for an adventure game released in the 90s, it’s also surprisingly functional! It manages to avoid a lot of the general trappings of the time (ways to render the game unbeatable, puzzles working on insane trains of logic, more items than you actually ever use) to create a functional and enjoyable experience based more on interaction and exploration than anything else. I also like how typical RPG/adventure game conventions get subverted — instead of doing quests to make others happy and make the town a better place, what you do in Harvester instead has adverse effects, harming people and tearing the town apart at an escalating level that directly calls into question what exactly it is you’re doing. There’s also combat! It’s… exactly as clunky and rough as you would expect for combat in a 90s adventure game, but it’s… at least kind of funny in its application and it’s only ever required once or twice so I could kind of shrug it aside as something that contributed to the game’s charm…

…Until you reach the Lodge — the base of the Order of the Harvest Moon, and where you spend the last third-ish of the game. It’s… honestly one of the worst things I've ever had to endure? The once thankfully-infrequent combat is now constant, with the final challenge before the ending putting you through ten arduous and clunky combat encounters back to back without any sort of break or ability to recoup. There’s now an element of resource management in play in terms of healing and ammo… but the game doesn’t give you nearly enough to deal with what it dishes out and you have absolutely no sense of when, exactly, you’re going to get more or when you’re actually reaching the end of the trek. The writing also takes a dip here: the game loses its ability to teeter the line between vaguely-possible-person and insane mouthpiece as constant new characters appear on the spot to monologue about the ills of society before trying to shoot you. This all leads up to a final reveal which… discards the narrative the game was pushing towards all for a whole new narrative which doesn’t really link up with what was going on before. There’s… a certain sense of amusement to be had in wondering what weird thing you’re going to see next, but it feels so… slapdash compared to what the game had been going for earlier, and gameplay-wise it’s just so unpleasant that it’s hard to glean any sort of fun out of it. The first time I played through I was caught completely unprepared and was just so shocked at how hard a drop it was compared to everything before it — and while I was able to go through it a lot more smoothly this time since I knew what was happening… god, what a miserable way to end the game.

But I still, at least, really like most everything that happens up until that point. Even with the presence of really bad, awful combat, and even with the spectre of The Lodge tainting the last third of the game… I still think Harvester’s a fun time! With fun, snappy writing that truly runs right up to the line between horror and black comedy, and with some… simple but fun adventure game design that turns the structure of ‘do puzzles and quests to make everything better’ completely on its head, Harvester is a guilty pleasure that despite… many issues I think holds up and is still somewhat incomparable today. 7/10.

This... is pretty short (like, 20 minutes at most) but it was a pretty fun time! The short of it is that you're a dude on his bike heading home after picking up a burger on the roadside and finding yourself constantly looping back to the parking lot. The two things I loved most was the artstyle and control scheme, the former — while it's kind of a popular artstyle among indie horror games these days — really making something aesthetically engaging out of what's supposed to pass as PS1 graphics. The control scheme, in addition, does a really good job at simulating what it's like being on a bike: really fun to go fast on, makes you feel like you're cutting through the breeze, but also really hard to control and really easy to crash and burn while attempting to make a quick turn. There's a nice slow escalation of dread that starts from the beginning and lasts to roughly the halfway point, but when that peaks and the next three loops just become chases with some evil force I started tapping out a bit — it leaned into having to deal with the deliberate flaws with the controls and also got a little bit monotonous. It ends strong, after that, but I'd say that whole second act prrrrobably drags the game down a good deal. Still, it's free, only lasts like 20 minutes and the other two acts are a blast, so I'd say check it out if you're interested! 7/10.

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

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

So this game is, uh, pretty obviously not great. You gun and stealth your way through levels with absolutely broken gun and stealth play and use the absolutely revolutionary revolver conversation system to randomly select responses to a conversation that run the gamut to "instantly get a game over" to "get caught in a shootout where you're shot multiple times before you can even get your gun over to an enemy." Game overs, mind you, put you back at the very beginning of a level because there aren't any checkpoints, meaning that if you don't quite get that you're supposed to shoot the helicopter to stop the final boss from escaping rather than catch up to it (which is what the game signposts) whoops! You're set back, like, 30 minutes of progress. Wanna figure out how the stealth mechanics work during a dedicated stealth segment and an enemy even so much as looks at you? Better hope you get used to seeing the intro cutscene for the level repeat over and over again. It's wayyyy too punishing and it makes an already broken game worse. The game as a whole isn't completely irredeemable — the core gameplay loop of staying crouched to block 90% of bullets, shooting enemies who can't hit back to dead silence is way more fun than it should be, ironic or not, and its short enough that it doesn't wear out the little welcome it has — but, uh, yeah. Maybe not "the 9/11 of video games" like the founder of Giant Bomb purported it to be, but still pretty bad. 3/10.

Alien: Isolation is rad. I don’t necessarily think it’s my favourite survival horror game but I can’t deny that it at least contends for the title. And this is as someone who… didn’t have a lot of experience with the Alien film series, at least beyond what’s been absorbed into pop culture. I remember reading an interview made to hype up Aliens: Colonial Marines where the devs talk about how painstakingly they attempted to make environments look exactly like they were in the original film all for the purpose of fanservice, and stuff I’ve read up on gives the impression that a lot of effort on that front was made here as well but even without that level of devotion to the series I was easily able to understand most of what was going on, plot-wise. I maybe don’t really have the viewpoint to say whether this game appeals to longtime fans — though from what knowledge I’ve absorbed it most certainly does — as someone new to the Alien franchise myself, I found this as good of an entry point as any.

The story follows Amanda Ripley, an engineer who joined the Weyland-Yutani Corporation in order to search for answers to her mother’s disappearance. When she heads to the space station Sevastopol in order to pursue a lead on the Nostromo, her mother’s ship, she finds the place in ruins and most of the crew dead — and the being that caused the destruction is now on the hunt for her. Now she has to scavenge her way through the desolation, hide from the alien, fight through all the other factions vying for her blood, and try and find a way to get off the ship.

And it works. Really well. In terms of gameplay, the closest thing I’d maybe compare it to would be Resident Evil VII: you explore/puzzle your way through a first-person environment, find quite a bit of lore to read through and figure out, craft items to take down unfriendly humans and androids… and then the Xenomorph comes in. It’s always on your ass. Nothing you do hurts it. If it sees you, and you don’t have the tools to get away from it, you’re dead. When it shows up, which it frequently does, it's like life-or-death hide-and-seek — you’ve got to figure out where to go, you’ve got to figure out where exactly the alien is, and you’ve got to figure out how to get from A to B without the alien seeing you. Even when you start getting tools that make getting caught no longer instant death, the alien never stops being a threat. Fuel and ammo are limited by what you can find, and eventually — if you start using one thing too many times — the alien will stop giving a shit and gun for you anyway. Anything you do is only temporary, and nothing will ever keep the Xenomorph down, from the first moment it appears right up until the very end of the game.

It’s not so oppressive all the time, though, and I think that’s something to the game’s benefit. For every moment, like the Medbay, where the alien is a constant threat and you’ve got to think out your every move, you then proceed to get an area like Seegson Synthetics where the only significant threats are looters and you’re given a lot more room to breathe. And just when you’ve gone through a bunch of low-intensity areas just like it… suddenly the alien’s back and you start to realize that all the shiny new tools you picked up only work to show it down. The game knows that constant tension will only leave the player exhausted, and does a really great job at mixing the intensity up and using its best aspects sparingly. I know that there’s been a lot of criticism about how the story goes longer than deemed necessary, but that was never a problem for me? There was never really a point where I was particularly waiting for the ride to be over, and — rather surprising for a survival horror game — I felt like some of the best (and scariest!) setpieces were located closer to the end of the experience more than anything, which I think speaks to how well the game manages to pace itself out.

Another thing I’d like to shout out is the game’s AI. I think most people already know about the wonders of the Xenomorph AI — such as how the game keeps track of the strategies you use to successfully get away from it and slowly makes the AI smart enough to start counteracting them — but something I’m also really into is how the AI for the looters and other regular humans on the ship plays out. They’re super variable in this flawed and human way, and it's clear even though they oppose you they’re mostly just dudes trapped in the same situation as you are. They’ll stop trying to shoot you the moment they see the alien, and some of the little interactions before they inevitably get gored often see you as unlikely comrades trying to survive against a mutual enemy. I’ve heard friends tell their stories about their experiences playing this game, and all their super memorable interactions with the human NPCs, and while most of mine were them being stupid and/or them getting themselves killed by the alien, I think its rad that just one part of the whole experience can inspire so many different stories.

There are other parts that maybe knock the experience down, though. The music is… obnoxious, honestly. In a game where diegetic sound is so important, and listening out for footsteps is the best way to know where the alien is, having generic orchestra cues blare over nearly everything at the slightest hint of the alien got in the way and felt cheap, especially considering the atmosphere that’d already been built without it. Using manual save stations, while it does really help to create tension… I wouldn’t have minded some auto-checkpoints, especially in some of the more difficult sections — oftentimes those sections would stop giving you save stations as frequently and it slowly became very frustrating to tread ground you’d already trodden over and over again when oftentimes the section you actually ran the risk of dying on was at least two minutes worth of traversal ahead. I… also feel like maybe the game could’ve done a bit more to signpost things to the player? Maybe it could be that I’m the actual problem, but there were… way more points than I could count where I just kind of didn’t know what I was supposed to do, and the tools the game uses to point a direction for the player (the map, the motion tracker) didn’t exactly do much to help.

But in general… man, this was great. Maybe not my favourite survival horror, but definitely at least a contender. I’ll be fascinated to see how exactly this stacks up compared to all the other games I play this September and October. 8/10.

man the real horror game is just how shitty the apartment you live in is, like seriously the first ten percent of the game is just coming home, doing the rounds, thinking something spooky's about to happen in your apartment but then realizing that no your laundry's eminating smoke because your apartment's just that shitty. it's hilarious

Otherwise... there's at least a neat concept here. You enter your home, find out somebody's murdered your girlfriend, and that you have eight minutes to figure out who they are and find a way to defend yourself before they come over to your place. It's a cool concept, and I like the feeling of frantically rushing around your shitty apartment trying to remember (or, well, find in this case, but it's the main protagonist trying to remember) where you put all your previously useless garbage... the main problem is that it takes half the game to even reach that point, and then three-quarters of the actual gameplay is spent trying to figure out who it could possibly be trying to kill you (when from the opening cutscene the culprit is INCREDIBLY obvious) instead of doing things like trying to run, blockade your home, try to figure out an escape route etc. etc. It's a neat concept wasted on something a bit too bogged down by a story that... doesn't need as much there as it does (seriously, why is the mystery aspect there at all) and combined with a really poor English translation and confusion as to who's speaking during some of the cutscene... my time with this game was okay enough, but I can't help but feel like there's potential for it to have been a lot better. 5/10.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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