spl
2011
of all the igdb cover art changes this is definitely one of the strangest. anyway here are some notes on game that i posted elsewhere, lightly edited:
world of this game gains a lot of presence just from being broken in a bunch of really detailed ways (climbing/descending works differently for seemingly every other staircase nd theres a bunch of props that just don’t have collision boxes)... which i gather is what ppl like about sonic adventure? but this has the advantage of being very easy to pick up and play over and over again and only taking ~2.5 hours to finish
the locations and dungeon crawl routes are connected in really convoluted/confusing and illogical ways that often seem disinterested in any coherent sense of progression, which reminds me of yume nikki a lot more than basically any of the games that tend to draw that comparison (there’s a moment in this game that’s EXTREMELY like getting teleported in front of a seemingly purposeless structure in the block world that rly stunned me when i first encountered it, like yes, this person gets it!!) but there’s the added weirdness that it’s taking place in the form of a bump-combat dungeon crawler instead of an artsy walking sim which adds this layer of cruft to everything.
i think this kind of mess has to be more common in games than i think it is, and that maybe that impression is just a matter of how i'm approaching them. still think that a gamelike hobbyist engine like rpgmaker lends itself uniquely to this kind of thing (even beyond the fact that so many of this game’s idiosnycrasies seemingly result from its creator trying to brute force an action game out of rpgm)
the story of this game is, you’re a crossdresser who’s been sent to purgatory and is searching for+destroying memory fragments from his life which take the form of hit-or-miss prose poetry segments. i’ve seen it criticized for not adding up to anything thematically but i think the effect of rifling thru dying memories and impressions is still well done, especially since those prose segments are placed so aggressively out of order.
on that note there’s this weird friction between how sketchy and scattered everything is + how placeless the locations feel, and the game’s attempts to imply a broader narrative?? like you hear about an “Angelica” in the protagonist’s memories and then you meet her ghost in an afterlife bar and its not commented on at all. idk i have a bad time articulating it (goes for this whole post tbh, altho in this case i think the term i’m looking for is just “incoherent storytelling” and im overthinking it) but i like it a lot
also it just has a wonderful mood and sense of place. maybe even helped by how scattered the world and narrative feel but mostly because the art is great. satie gymnopedie/gnossienne in rpgm is a cliche but this is forever the classic instance to me.
this post is horrendously incoherent but so is the game, thankfully!! the other carrionblue/moga/bilexth games ive played are more fully-formed but i dont love any of them quite as much, altho i do like the music and nightmare tone of GHost Suburb II
OTHER SHIT:
- sometimes you spawn on a gap and can’t move until an enemy attacks you and you recoil onto an open space
- dying in this game is very strange… seems to be random chance whether you’re sent straight to the menu screen or to an afterlife zone, and whether or not an unspecified “mysterious voice” tells you “this is no good-- you must go to the unhappy place.”
- checking your inventory doesn’t use rpgm’s built in inventory system but instead calls up a series of text boxes saying “you have 6 or so rubies” “you have 10 or so obsidian” etc.
- what is the sapphire door??
- there are little pickup-filled siderooms you can teleport into from floating red orbs scattered thruout the dungeon. but with a single exception they all seem to be the same instance because leaving them returns you to the SAME dungeon room regardless of where you entered from.
- the circus tent is good
- mostly useless point system
- prose poetry-only easy mode takes place in a bizarrely fleshed-out bespoke location??
- game can seemingly not decide whether it’s called “i’m scared of girls” or “scarygirls”
- skull shop :)
PRESENT SPL HERE still love how big and elusive this game feels. there's entire strange areas i remember visiting before that i didnt get to on my latest playthru and i dont remember how i got to them in the first place. wistful half-memory of the kind otherwise only evoked by yume the nikki.
world of this game gains a lot of presence just from being broken in a bunch of really detailed ways (climbing/descending works differently for seemingly every other staircase nd theres a bunch of props that just don’t have collision boxes)... which i gather is what ppl like about sonic adventure? but this has the advantage of being very easy to pick up and play over and over again and only taking ~2.5 hours to finish
the locations and dungeon crawl routes are connected in really convoluted/confusing and illogical ways that often seem disinterested in any coherent sense of progression, which reminds me of yume nikki a lot more than basically any of the games that tend to draw that comparison (there’s a moment in this game that’s EXTREMELY like getting teleported in front of a seemingly purposeless structure in the block world that rly stunned me when i first encountered it, like yes, this person gets it!!) but there’s the added weirdness that it’s taking place in the form of a bump-combat dungeon crawler instead of an artsy walking sim which adds this layer of cruft to everything.
i think this kind of mess has to be more common in games than i think it is, and that maybe that impression is just a matter of how i'm approaching them. still think that a gamelike hobbyist engine like rpgmaker lends itself uniquely to this kind of thing (even beyond the fact that so many of this game’s idiosnycrasies seemingly result from its creator trying to brute force an action game out of rpgm)
the story of this game is, you’re a crossdresser who’s been sent to purgatory and is searching for+destroying memory fragments from his life which take the form of hit-or-miss prose poetry segments. i’ve seen it criticized for not adding up to anything thematically but i think the effect of rifling thru dying memories and impressions is still well done, especially since those prose segments are placed so aggressively out of order.
on that note there’s this weird friction between how sketchy and scattered everything is + how placeless the locations feel, and the game’s attempts to imply a broader narrative?? like you hear about an “Angelica” in the protagonist’s memories and then you meet her ghost in an afterlife bar and its not commented on at all. idk i have a bad time articulating it (goes for this whole post tbh, altho in this case i think the term i’m looking for is just “incoherent storytelling” and im overthinking it) but i like it a lot
also it just has a wonderful mood and sense of place. maybe even helped by how scattered the world and narrative feel but mostly because the art is great. satie gymnopedie/gnossienne in rpgm is a cliche but this is forever the classic instance to me.
this post is horrendously incoherent but so is the game, thankfully!! the other carrionblue/moga/bilexth games ive played are more fully-formed but i dont love any of them quite as much, altho i do like the music and nightmare tone of GHost Suburb II
OTHER SHIT:
- sometimes you spawn on a gap and can’t move until an enemy attacks you and you recoil onto an open space
- dying in this game is very strange… seems to be random chance whether you’re sent straight to the menu screen or to an afterlife zone, and whether or not an unspecified “mysterious voice” tells you “this is no good-- you must go to the unhappy place.”
- checking your inventory doesn’t use rpgm’s built in inventory system but instead calls up a series of text boxes saying “you have 6 or so rubies” “you have 10 or so obsidian” etc.
- what is the sapphire door??
- there are little pickup-filled siderooms you can teleport into from floating red orbs scattered thruout the dungeon. but with a single exception they all seem to be the same instance because leaving them returns you to the SAME dungeon room regardless of where you entered from.
- the circus tent is good
- mostly useless point system
- prose poetry-only easy mode takes place in a bizarrely fleshed-out bespoke location??
- game can seemingly not decide whether it’s called “i’m scared of girls” or “scarygirls”
- skull shop :)
PRESENT SPL HERE still love how big and elusive this game feels. there's entire strange areas i remember visiting before that i didnt get to on my latest playthru and i dont remember how i got to them in the first place. wistful half-memory of the kind otherwise only evoked by yume the nikki.
god, people who can't help getting dragged back to this website year after year is my favorite thing. god bless
didnt care for this game idk
didnt care for this game idk
2004
sympathize with the ppl who call the framing device and ending exploitative (now two!!), especially those frustrated that indie games have followed up on that more than on this game's greater strengths, but it is a little charming to me? like as much as the deconstructed vgame aesthetics place the game culturally, the menhera especially does so in a way that's much more ill-considered and thinglike instead of ethereal/artistic (2ch instead of artgame^). and the game manages to be thinglike and ethereal at the same time in a way where one's kind of inseparable from the other?? i mean, the quality of thingness itself, not to say that the juvenile menhera shit is integral to yume nikki's meaning or anything... i think theres a connection here with how clearly being made in rpgmaker heightens the game's vitality+mystery as much as it seemingly compromises its purity of vision. but i guess this is all a pretentious way of saying again "i think the flaws are charming"
(for the record this is the other person i alluded to. the above thoughts are kind of bad sorry, but i hope there is something of value in there for someone)
^i know "artgame" is itself pretty artistically compromising but u get what i mean ok
(for the record this is the other person i alluded to. the above thoughts are kind of bad sorry, but i hope there is something of value in there for someone)
^i know "artgame" is itself pretty artistically compromising but u get what i mean ok
TBD
picked this up for 5 minutes cuz i was feeling nostalgic. concept is unremarkable but game predictably defaults to spinning as much vgame nonsense out of it as possible (points, challenge increasing in phases etc.) not necessary, v emblematic of the "one clever mechanic" type design in vogue at the time
i know im obnoxiously trashing in a decade-old jam game but it doesnt go far enough with "everything on the screen is part of the game mechanically" like the cursor isn't part of the game mechanically neither is the effect of a box getting sucked into your avatar
idk just seeing what i can learn... "solid color square spinning around" was a cornerstone of my vidgame aesthetics when i was 10
i know im obnoxiously trashing in a decade-old jam game but it doesnt go far enough with "everything on the screen is part of the game mechanically" like the cursor isn't part of the game mechanically neither is the effect of a box getting sucked into your avatar
idk just seeing what i can learn... "solid color square spinning around" was a cornerstone of my vidgame aesthetics when i was 10
2012
remember being left cold by this. sure flashes of humanity while out of your mind at the Club or w/e (i've never been to a party before) but showing a picture of a baby or a car crash on the screen or having an honest to god Love Minigame - subverted i guess but still too familiar - seemed like especially one-note ways of doing that. it really is just basic 2000s/2010s weepy artsy indie shit but with slightly more flair. idk strikes me as kind of obvious and self-serious when the increpares i liked most (namely opera omnia, universal history of light, subway adventure, the serpent) exhibited a lot of distanciation and shi and humor where applicable.
2012
i've never gotten whole the deal with this game but that might have to do with it practically deciding the formula 90% of rote rpgmaker horrors would follow for the decade and counting to come which is at least historically rad
this review is helping tho
this review is helping tho
2022
signanus 😂😂😂 (i've had this stuck in my head for more than a year)
1996
life will never give you the snoods you need
judge not the snood
judge not the snood
2006
( notes on whole series)
To me this is deliberately a pointlessly gloomy series. That reading probably says more about me than the series but i at least reckon it's the kind of thing that requires you to provide your own emotional distance from what it shows you. LLL2 especially struck me for being cynical to the point of self-defeat: "if you steal from the rich the poor will get greedy and the rich will starve" is clearly not something the game actually believes in and speaks more to a general pessimism about everything (see also the new agey ecology and you slam poetry bgm) including the integrity of its own pessimism. this also holds for the amusingly bleak ending of LLL3. I think the series as a whole evokes such states of mind and in particular the fear of becoming a functional adult pretty well, regardless of where it takes them, if anywhere. (I should reiterate my reading of this game is very self-centered and rooted in the kind of person i was when i first played this game, take it as nothing more than a personal reaction!! I know nothing)
There's also a lot to be said for how these games look and sound. In particular, the distorted pixels that result from setting the gamemaker sprite editor's "resize image" function to "poor" quality and the blurriness created by its "rotate image" function really speak to me as someone who grew up with the engine. There's an alternate universe where this kind of thing is as much a calling card of gamemaker as unused rpg menus are of rpgmaker or plunderludic aesthetics are of unity, instead of the vaguer matrix of "z-games"/"newgrounds shitpost"/"boring workmanly indie"/cactus that its corpus ended up being. also, the song in LLL3 is an all-timer shittymidi vgm.
Gameplay wise the LLL games seem predictive of some of Jake Clovers walking sims, like galah galah, waterfall, and duck turnip, the last of which I would describe as one of the few games that actually understands the value of restraint. I think these games are important in that their lack of interactivity leads to more elusive effects than you can get from either the mechanical or narrative/textual depth ppl usually focus on in vgames, or for that matter from tedious 'WASD essays'. Jake clover is generally more elusive (only being able to walk and other forms of non-interactivity become ways of focusing stray impulses meditatively or engaging in weird kinds of roleplay etc. etc) which I like more but I might be missing something with LLL.
To me this is deliberately a pointlessly gloomy series. That reading probably says more about me than the series but i at least reckon it's the kind of thing that requires you to provide your own emotional distance from what it shows you. LLL2 especially struck me for being cynical to the point of self-defeat: "if you steal from the rich the poor will get greedy and the rich will starve" is clearly not something the game actually believes in and speaks more to a general pessimism about everything (see also the new agey ecology and you slam poetry bgm) including the integrity of its own pessimism. this also holds for the amusingly bleak ending of LLL3. I think the series as a whole evokes such states of mind and in particular the fear of becoming a functional adult pretty well, regardless of where it takes them, if anywhere. (I should reiterate my reading of this game is very self-centered and rooted in the kind of person i was when i first played this game, take it as nothing more than a personal reaction!! I know nothing)
There's also a lot to be said for how these games look and sound. In particular, the distorted pixels that result from setting the gamemaker sprite editor's "resize image" function to "poor" quality and the blurriness created by its "rotate image" function really speak to me as someone who grew up with the engine. There's an alternate universe where this kind of thing is as much a calling card of gamemaker as unused rpg menus are of rpgmaker or plunderludic aesthetics are of unity, instead of the vaguer matrix of "z-games"/"newgrounds shitpost"/"boring workmanly indie"/cactus that its corpus ended up being. also, the song in LLL3 is an all-timer shittymidi vgm.
Gameplay wise the LLL games seem predictive of some of Jake Clovers walking sims, like galah galah, waterfall, and duck turnip, the last of which I would describe as one of the few games that actually understands the value of restraint. I think these games are important in that their lack of interactivity leads to more elusive effects than you can get from either the mechanical or narrative/textual depth ppl usually focus on in vgames, or for that matter from tedious 'WASD essays'. Jake clover is generally more elusive (only being able to walk and other forms of non-interactivity become ways of focusing stray impulses meditatively or engaging in weird kinds of roleplay etc. etc) which I like more but I might be missing something with LLL.
never related to a videogame character more than verge clinging desperately to strangers' responses to irrelevant shit he posts on an internet forum
2017
the first time i played this i couldnt figure out the controls so i couldnt get the other guy to come before the timer ran out. after we finished he just gave me a disappointed look and walked out of the room. it's the most viscerally ashamed of myself a videogame has ever made me feel. in any case this is the most erotic game i have played.
not a magnificent game overall but i can't think of anything that so successfully isolates embodiment as a process w/in "game feel" which alone makes it like a must play to me. uniquely mesmerizing. taught me how to drive a car better than any racing game could
1990
idk ive written 2 inane self-important diatribes about how i dislike this game by now but the long and short of it is this did not in fact advance the art of storytelling in videogames and i think i lose braincells thinking about it
1985
- i'm mildly offended that this game expects me to find it entertaining
- i was initially drawn to the charmingly abstract economy including a mysterious minigame at the start of each session where you shoot at descending bags of money to determine your starting budget. well as it happens the economy never gets more complicated than "don't shoot at anything that isn't a bandit", so there's really nothing here
- not especially bothered by the fact that i couldn't tell at first that the bouncing little men were NOT bandits but were civilians pointing me to my quarry and shooting them was NOT legal - wasn't a problem once i found out. more bothered by the fact that their presence reduces the gameplay loop to taking a bunch of directions through one of the more frightfully monotonous videogame maps i've ever inhabited. not even an interesting kind of busywork and i think a part of my negative reaction is also that the game dresses it all up so handsomely instead of doubling down on the sparseness and monotony.
- this game's idea of "quick draw" is miserable. using a joystick to aim is always a bad idea. having half a second to aim is alright but not having half a second to identify where the other guy even is. to make matters worse, at the end of that half-second the man is guaranteed a hit on you. bullshit!! none of the drama or romance of a real (fictional) quick draw. i haven't watched a single western but i know this aint it nor was it never
- i'm not one to go boy am i glad for the Quality Control in games nowadays but boy howdee does this ever play like shit. your little guy can only walk forward, turning 90 degrees in every direction, which is a trouble when you are expected to a) aim and b) evade the civilians dashing all over the place at the speed of a carriage. the keyboard controls are predictably carpal tunnel-inducing but the joystick is somehow not much better: you may point it in any of the ordinal directions to move thataway but your little guy is still obliged to turn giving his movement a nauseatingly stuttering quality, especially in tenser moments. of course, the ordinal directions for your joystick do not correspond perfectly to those in the game's isometric view, either. i can abide and often enjoy excruciating movement controls but "excruciation" implies a kind of active struggle, tension, cruft, bearing with it. this is just slippery, and everything moves too fast. this all may sound nebulous and in fact it is; i'm not very sure myself why these irritations don't in fact complicate the tediousness of this game's setup. playing more actual games is making me reevaluate my immature unilateral stance on such "bad games". but in any case i dont want to just say Game Not Fun
- Game Not Fun
- i figured i'd played too many good old games lately so this was a welcome change of pace. from what i played of nightshade it seems to have all the same problems
- the tech WAS there, they weren't trying. manic miner and jetpac had been released two years earlier and are at least interesting to play. it wouldn't have taken much to make a game like this worthwhile
- i was initially drawn to the charmingly abstract economy including a mysterious minigame at the start of each session where you shoot at descending bags of money to determine your starting budget. well as it happens the economy never gets more complicated than "don't shoot at anything that isn't a bandit", so there's really nothing here
- not especially bothered by the fact that i couldn't tell at first that the bouncing little men were NOT bandits but were civilians pointing me to my quarry and shooting them was NOT legal - wasn't a problem once i found out. more bothered by the fact that their presence reduces the gameplay loop to taking a bunch of directions through one of the more frightfully monotonous videogame maps i've ever inhabited. not even an interesting kind of busywork and i think a part of my negative reaction is also that the game dresses it all up so handsomely instead of doubling down on the sparseness and monotony.
- this game's idea of "quick draw" is miserable. using a joystick to aim is always a bad idea. having half a second to aim is alright but not having half a second to identify where the other guy even is. to make matters worse, at the end of that half-second the man is guaranteed a hit on you. bullshit!! none of the drama or romance of a real (fictional) quick draw. i haven't watched a single western but i know this aint it nor was it never
- i'm not one to go boy am i glad for the Quality Control in games nowadays but boy howdee does this ever play like shit. your little guy can only walk forward, turning 90 degrees in every direction, which is a trouble when you are expected to a) aim and b) evade the civilians dashing all over the place at the speed of a carriage. the keyboard controls are predictably carpal tunnel-inducing but the joystick is somehow not much better: you may point it in any of the ordinal directions to move thataway but your little guy is still obliged to turn giving his movement a nauseatingly stuttering quality, especially in tenser moments. of course, the ordinal directions for your joystick do not correspond perfectly to those in the game's isometric view, either. i can abide and often enjoy excruciating movement controls but "excruciation" implies a kind of active struggle, tension, cruft, bearing with it. this is just slippery, and everything moves too fast. this all may sound nebulous and in fact it is; i'm not very sure myself why these irritations don't in fact complicate the tediousness of this game's setup. playing more actual games is making me reevaluate my immature unilateral stance on such "bad games". but in any case i dont want to just say Game Not Fun
- Game Not Fun
- i figured i'd played too many good old games lately so this was a welcome change of pace. from what i played of nightshade it seems to have all the same problems
- the tech WAS there, they weren't trying. manic miner and jetpac had been released two years earlier and are at least interesting to play. it wouldn't have taken much to make a game like this worthwhile
2004
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cf2x3nqKaM <- due to using it as background music this video is permanently associated for me with the angsty yume nikki fanfiction with practically exploitative suicide themes that i wrote while locked down in high school. no you cant find it now. i mean maybe if you contact me but immediately after sharing it i'll unfriend you.