Me, playing this via Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration after having played several garbage Atari 2600, Jaguar, and Lynx games back-to-back, praying for a single good game.

Tempest 2000 rocks.

I'm not the biggest fan of the original 1981 Tempest, while I do respect it especially for the time. It's good arcadey fun, but there's something about it when compared with other games of its time. It just doesn't do much for me.

Tempest 2000 on the other hand feels like a clear definitive version of the game. The graphical effects are aged, but still incredibly cool and engaging. The classic version of Tempest is included with a slight graphical "upgrade" (vector graphics will never die), and the new "2000" version adds fun stuff like power-ups into the mix.

Overall, I love this a lot. It's one of the few games on the Atari 50 collection that fills me with the feeling of "I'd love to play this again sometime."

If you're a millenial or an early zoomer, there's a chance that Christianity and religion was part of your life at some point, wether you wanted it or not. With the sudden uprise of the LGBTQ+ movement and rights, people are less and less afraid of being queer to the point "gay" is not an insult anymore. We Know the Devil is a story released at a moment in life where acceptance wasn't as present as it is today (online, at least) but christianity and religion was still quite present.

One of the things you'll notice very early on is how unsettling and distant the soundtrack is. Almost as if it always stalking, waiting for the moment to catch you off guard. It doesn't really has much calm moments where you can actually relax. It's a soundtrack that perfectly encapsulates the feeling of trying to hide something, of a danger that is lurking but hasn't striken. It sometimes manifests itself like a broken disc, with static and scratches.
I am unaware if this is intentional or not, but at one point where the game is using the second "messiest" song, they are talking about radio static being described as "God is already warning us".

The writing respects the reader with a storytelling that skips over details and lets you fill in the blanks based on the information you receive with the interaction of each character.
Every time details are given, it's to plant a seed on the reader. A seed of doubt. A seed of curiosity. A seed of inquisivity.
To give a non spoilery example, at one moment the player asks themselves what even is this camp. What are the intentions behind it aside of religious, which is when the game does this clever thing of [i]telling[/i] it's hand rather than showing it by saying it's a camp for "bad kids", which ponders the question of what is considered bad based upon the entire religious context. It is a line delivered fairly early into the game which really helps the reader to start analyzing more and more the possible reasons why these kids were sent here. Although they're ultimately revealed, it has never felt as if the writing is mad at you for not figuring things out earlier.

We Know the Devil might be short, but it takes a lot of care in it's writing , which is something I truly admire.

--

On a personal note, aside of the review and more of a vent than anything, I want to mention that I knew I was trans since a very early age. Religion never truly sticked with me thanks to my brother that really fucking hated going to church (just like me) because of how boring it was. We stopped going at an early age and one of the arguments we gave was that the church is nothing but humans who read the bible and interpreted a specific way. We got out of religion with the excuse that we wanted ot have our own interpretation of the bible and follow our own path with our own beliefs. It is important to note that my brother is 4 years older than I and my brain was too small to formulate these kinds of thoughts yet so all I did was nod to whatever he said for.. some years.
Seeking my own interpretation of the bible, I finally felt at peace. It was the moment where being queer stopped being shameful. Where I started to question myself and how I was feeling -- hell, at one moment I even had the interpretation that we're all our own god, which is the opposite conclusion the game gives in each arc lol --, yet it took me more than 10 years to finally come out of the closet to my family.
I'll never forget how my mom, who volunteers at the church, grabbed me by the arms and told me "please, never be gay. I see them suffer so much". At that moment my young self understood that as "it's not safe to be gay" and therefore.. hid it. I never repressed it, I hid it.
I blocked my family from all social media, I prohibited from entering my room and slowly but surely cut contact with them as much as I could.
I isolated myself from my family out of fear.
As the years went by, my parents and family kept saying they missed me, that they wish I was more present, but every time I tried they all mocked me and pushed me deeper into isolation until I felt like trying wasn't worth it.
After coming out of the closet, my dad did not talk to me for a while. My mom was overwhelmed at basically having her daughter tell her she has to help her rewire her, and my brother had other things to worry about, specially after those years of extreme isolation on my end.
Fast forward to today, I am living in another country with my wife in a family that accepts me and accompanies me as a whole. I'm still in contact with my parents. My dad talks to me but by my deadname and refuses to call me by my now legal name, so I avoid him if possible. My mom wishes she could be closer to me but realizes not even herself knows how to be a woman, and therefore doesn't know how to be a mother. She feels more like a friend that worries about me but doesn't have the words nor means to support me. I'm sorry mom.
My brother on the other hand, I want to call him a cunt but he has all the reasons and rights to be one. It's not like I have been the best sister to him.

I am having a good life where I'm free, loved and don't have to hide myself anymore, but sometimes I have to get reminded of the two decades I spent in the closet to not go there again.

Lowering the bar.

Black Mesa is a fan remake-cum-reimagining of Half-Life, and it shows. It’s a very technically impressive game, extracting just about everything it can possibly wring out of the damp towel that is the Source engine. It’s a fairly well-designed game, by virtue of most of its elements being copied over wholesale from the original Half-Life. It’s obviously made by people who are very, very passionate about Valve’s work. But Black Mesa forgets, omits, or changes enough of what worked before that it ultimately commits the mortal and unforgivable sin of making Half-Life kind of boring, a crime for which it must be punished by making it boil upside-down beneath the lake of ice for all eternity.

I like Half-Life a lot. I hardly love playing Half-Life, but it’s a game that I both enjoy and respect, which is a sadly uncommon combination. I’ve never existed in a world without Half-Life, a statement which I’m hoping will make some of you wither into dust, and that makes it a bit difficult to personally gauge the impact it had. Obviously, there are hundreds upon hundreds of reports detailing exactly what made Half-Life so special. There are articles and videos and commentary tracks all recounting all of the little quirks and nuances that later shooters silently adopted because it was what they were expected to do now. I can appreciate it from a sort-of dispassionate, outside perspective; as far as I can tell, shooters before Half-Life were mostly just copying Doom’s homework, for better and for worse. If nothing else, you can absolutely tell that a big shift to a more cinematic style was emerging with Half-Life — again, for better and for worse.

Regardless of the finer details, Half-Life is now a very old game. Twenty-five years old, in fact. And the neat thing about games that get that old is that it inherently primes people for a remake. “The gameplay needs an update”, “the graphics look bad”, “fix Xen”, the masses say. It’s a mentality you have for toys. Make it shiny, make it new, make it talk when you pull the string on its back, make sure you add lens flares and ray tracing. It’s certainly nothing that Half-Life needs. Half-Life is already an incredibly solid game that had a fierce impact on the industry and near single-handedly made Valve the monolith that it is today. To suggest that Half-Life — just about any game, really — needs a remake is to fundamentally assign this toy mentality to art.

But, hell, a remake could still be cool.

I like Half-Life, and Crowbar Collective likes Half-Life, and a lot of other people all really like Half-Life. Besides, the game has already been made for them. If all they’re doing is porting it from GoldSrc to Source, what’s the worst that could happen?

We ultimately don’t know the worst case scenario, because it never came to pass. We do, however, know of a pretty rough scenario, which is Black Mesa releasing in the state that it’s in.

The initial few levels are actually very impressive, largely because of how close they play to the original. The tram ride is there, the resonance cascade is there, the brutal ammo restrictions and tight corridors filled with headcrabs and zombies are still there. Hell, even your first encounters with the aliens are tense and unforgiving, encouraging you to use flares to light enemies on fire in order to conserve your ammo. It’s neat! All the way from the start of Anomalous Materials to the end of Office Complex, Black Mesa feels remarkably like Half-Life fully realized. It’s all shiny and pretty, you’ve got some mechanics to play with that were originally intended but didn’t make it to the final release, and it’s a very enjoyable time. You can even forgive Crowbar Collective for getting rid of the scientist who dives through the window and says “greetings”.

And then We’ve Got Hostiles starts.

The HECU still look like they’re holding MP5s and pistols, but they’re secretly wielding Freeman-seeking laser beams. There’s no longer an ounce of hesitation on their part; if they see a hair on your head poking out from cover, they’re shooting you, and you’re taking damage. They’re like Blood cultists in body armor. Also in keeping with pre-Half-Life design decisions, their AI has been drastically dumbed down. The HECU will still at least try to flank you, but they no longer seem all that interested in the concept of their own survival. They’ll rush you down open corridors with no cover, seemingly only interested in getting as in your face as they possibly can, regardless of whether they’re holding an SMG or a shotgun. Throwing a grenade at their feet will make them loudly announce that there’s a nearby grenade, but they don’t ever seem to actually try getting away from it. They’ll do the little Source Engine shuffle that the Combine like to do — if you’ve played enough Half-Life 2, you know exactly what I’m referring to — and then blow up. This is in obvious and stark contrast to the HECU in Half-Life who, while hardly all the avatars of John Rambo, at least seemed like they weren’t showing up just to die. Combat in Black Mesa against the Marines largely just boils down to you and a grunt sprinting at one another with the fire button held down and you winning the war of attrition by virtue of being the only guy here with power armor. Compared to the earlier, more impactful Black Mesa fights against Vortigaunts and houndeyes, this is a letdown; compared to the HECU in the original, it’s shocking.

Given how frequently you enter skirmishes with the Marines, it's something you really can't ever get away from for the overwhelming majority of the game. Crowbar Collective mentioned that their goal was to "make combat more intense", and it seems as though they've tried to do that simply by flooding rooms with significantly more enemies. By my count, Half-Life's We've Got Hostiles pits you against 21 HECU; Black Mesa sends out 32. It doesn't sound like much, and it isn't at first, but it starts to add up fast. Someone on Reddit actually went through and counted every single on-screen HECU kill, and it comes out to over 550 in Black Mesa compared to Half-Life's 250. When you also take into consideration the fact that pre-Xen levels are condensed compared to the original (with On A Rail being noticeably cut way down), the enemy density is completely out of control.

It's not just that there are more of them now, either. The HECU take roughly the same amount of bullets to put down (about 60 health in Black Mesa relative to the original 80), and your ammo is even tighter than it used to be. Being able to carry 250 SMG bullets with ten grenade rounds on the alt-fire was a bit too freeing and a bit too fun, so now you're hard-capped at 150 SMG bullets and three grenade rounds. The pistol now only holds 150 rounds, instead of 250. The shotgun now holds 64 shells instead of 125. The enemy AI is somehow stupider than the one from twenty-five years ago, so it's not like the game has been made any more difficult now that Gordon's got the HEV suit without pockets; holding the MP5 at head height and clicking from a distance seems to do most of the work for you, and the HECU drop about as much SMG ammo as it takes to kill them. The optimal strategy, it seems, is to just hang back and fish for damage multiplier headshots with the MP5 and then go to the next slaughtermap room to continue the process for the next seven hours until Xen.

While Half-Life's Xen was the end product of tightening deadlines and dwindling budgets, Black Mesa's Xen exists almost as a complete refutation of the original's design circumstances; it very obviously got an overwhelming amount of development time and assets and takes up nearly a third of the new game, whereas the previous Xen was over and done with in about twenty minutes. I think Xen is where Black Mesa most obviously becomes a fan game, because it's clear that nobody in charge ever felt the need to say "no" to anything. It's incredibly long, packed to the gills with scripted setpieces and references to later Half-Life titles, and it keeps using the same wire connecting puzzles and conveyor belt rides over and over again in the hopes that making Xen longer will make Xen better. There's a section here in Interloper where you have to bounce off of one of three spring platforms to kill a Controller, and then that opens a path for you to destroy a fleshy glob maintaining a force field. You would think that the fact that this is split into three very distinct paths would mean that you would thus have three very distinct encounters, but they all play almost identically to one another. All three of them are circular rooms with a Controller floating around, and you break his crystals in order to make him vulnerable to your attacks. It isn't a difficult fight, and it isn't a complicated puzzle, and ultimately just winds up being the exact same thing three times in a row. This happens constantly throughout Interloper, which mostly consists of you sprinting down long conveyor belts and then jumping off of them onto other conveyor belts for about two straight hours.

What burns me most about Black Mesa's Xen, however, is that the entire borderworld has had the personality sucked straight out of it. Xen used to be a Giger-esque hellscape, all bone and speckled carapace. A lot of the level geometry textures were taken straight from reference photos of insects, and it did a great job selling Xen as something of a hive; lots of gross, fleshy, chitinous pockets carved into the walls, pale white and red moving parts that are clearly both artificial and organic. It makes sense, contextually, because the Nihilanth is itself a hybrid of flesh and metal, and the home that it's made of Xen is reflected in its design. Black Mesa's Xen, in its deepest parts, is way more heavy on the machinery angle than the organic one. Through the thick, red haze, it's hard to tell what you're even looking at. The glowing blue lights leading you by the nose sit next to what are very clearly just steel girders and pistons, which is immensely boring when you compare it to the almost-living Xen from two and a half decades ago.

Old Xen's inspirations were obvious, but it still managed to carve an identity out of them. Black Mesa's Xen, on the other hand, looks like fucking everything else.

I want you to look at these two pictures and tell me that they don't look like they were from the same game. I want you to look at this screenshot and tell me that you can't picture the SSV Normandy flying straight through it. I want you to look at this image and tell me that it doesn't look like a Destiny raid map. Whatever identity Xen once had is gone, stripped bare to make it completely indistinct from any photobashed ArtStation "outer space" drawing to be used for padding out a portfolio and nothing else. Originality is both overrated and unimportant, but when you throw out something neat in favor of something bland, I'm going to be hard on it. Gordon Freeman crawls grunting to his feet after going through the Lambda Core teleporter and walks through blue bio-luminescent plants until he sees the Eye of Sauron looking down on him and a woman starts singing over baby's first synthwave.

On that note, Black Mesa has entered itself into the club of Media that Needs to Shut the Fuck Up, given how it starts playing some pretty mediocre tunes from the word go and never ever stops. Music is playing constantly throughout the game, never giving you a single quiet moment or a chance to drink in the layered soundscapes, and it hardly even has the decency to be good most of the time. For every decent pull that fits the action, there are two tracks that clash so hard that they spoil the scene they're in. Blast Pit 3 plays during the sequence in Blast Pit where you have to sneak past the tentacles back up through the missile silo. The incredibly loud, chugging guitars that lead into the How to Compose Dramatic Music For Film tinkling piano keys don't fit the sequence at all. Again and again, these amateurish tracks keep leaching into the game like pesticides into groundwater. The intro to Lambda Core where you uneventfully ride a freight elevator for two minutes is punctuated by steel drums and pounding synths in a moment that should be quiet and introspective; Blast Pit 1 legitimately sounds like a recording of somebody warming up before their actual performance; every single track on Xen inevitably leads into the exact same fucking ethereal female vocals "ooh"ing and "aah"ing over the instrumentation. It wasn't enough for Xen to look like everything else on the market, so all of its songs sound identical to one another, too. It's rough. It's so clearly a collection of just about every thought the composer has ever had in the past two decades, all strung together end to end without much of any consideration as to when it ought to be playing or what ought to even make it into the final game. I can't remember the last time that a game's music annoyed me this much.

Peel away the layers and poke your fingers through the flesh, and Half-Life is still at the core of Black Mesa. Enough of it is still present that playing Black Mesa isn't a completely miserable experience. All it managed to make me feel, however, was that I'd rather just be playing the original instead. Black Mesa can't manage to be anything more than a slipshod imitation of Half-Life, and the moments that it does well are the moments that Valve already did better twenty-five years ago.

Xen was never bad.

Wow, look! Nothing!

I’ve never really liked Half-Life 2 — maybe I’ll get into that in a later post — so I didn’t expect much from the episodes. They’ve always remained as the bailey to the motte for a lot of fans, I’ve noticed, who I’ve told I didn’t like Half-Life 2. The episodes are where Half-Life 2 really gets good, they’ve told me. Of course, I’ve been told in equal measure that the episodes are where Half-Life 2 gets bad, and that’s the exact kind of fandom splitter that makes my ears perk up. Not liking something and then hearing that the sequel to it is both loved and reviled by the original fans may as well be the recipe to getting me to immediately buy a game. Besides, they’re only a dollar each, and they come with Deathmatch. They come with Lost Coast, too, but, you know, they come with Deathmatch.

And Episode One is kind of boring.

So little actually happens! Episode One, broadly speaking, is a rehash of the citadel section of Half-Life 2, a singular “wait for the elevator” section, and then about two city blocks of walking in a straight line before you do an escort mission. Valve was seriously crunching to get this out in time, and they still ended up missing their projected release date by nearly a full year. I have no idea how or why they thought they were going to be able to publish a new episode every three months. Even with all of the reused assets and an existing storyline to continue off of, expecting your developers and designers to be able to drop two hours of a playable game every ninety days is ridiculous. With such an inherently silly backing concept, it's a bit of a miracle that the two episodes ended up releasing at all.

Actually playing it is a bit of a hassle. I really didn't care for the constant "stop what you're doing to stand around while characters talk at you" interruptions in Half-Life 2, because you could usually at least skip traditional cutscenes. Episode One spends a lot of time in its earliest stages asking you to patiently wait while characters have revelations next to you. Stand around while Alex figures out how to get you across a gap, stand around while Alex hacks a door and admires the scenery, hang around while Alex downloads some data off of the Combine mainframe. The actual combat offers some clever setpieces, at least — letting you go wild with the empowered gravity gun again, some incredibly dark areas littered with zombies, Combine fights on long, open streets where you get supported by rebels on the rooftops — but it takes a long time before those get going, and each of those has an equal and opposite "finagle cars on top of antlion hills" section.

Episode One is written kind of annoyingly. A friend of mine blames Erik Wolpaw for this, and I suppose that makes sense; I think the strongest facet of Half-Life 2 is unarguably its aesthetic, followed closely behind by its writing. I’ve never loved how reliant on lore and supplementary materials Half-Life 2 is for getting any context into any of what’s going on, but I respect it. I think it’s a pretty interesting and bold idea to throw just about everything from the beloved original out in favor of starting from a blank slate with the sequel. Episode One, by contrast, starts about two seconds after the ending of Half-Life 2, and largely plays everything straight from there. In itself, I can't find a problem with the overarching plot. I don’t, however, care for the characters.

There’s something very infantilizing about the way characters talk to Gordon in this, especially Alyx. I don’t know if she thinks Gordon hit his head or something, but the talks to him the way that she talks to Dog. You open a grate cover or do a puzzle about as complicated as fitting wood blocks into shaped holes and she drops everything to cheer you on. “You’re so smart, Gordon. You’re such a smart guy. I love smart guys. Smart guys are the best. You’re such a smart, smart boy.” Enough! I know we’re writing with the intent to appeal to people who unironically called the last game “the thinking man’s FPS”, but this is too much. The whole “zombine” bit is also so obviously written with the intent to become a meme, which is a trend that continues well into Episode Two. Given what Wolpaw has written since, I think blaming him may actually be a fair assessment.

Exit 17 is an incredibly underwhelming end to an already unimpressive episode. It's not hard to imagine the dev team huddled around a table late into the night, desperately trying to figure out how to end the game, and then someone yells "fuck it, make them do the same escort quest five times". Five times. With some minor changes to the route, mind, but five times all the same. A door gets blown open, an exit gets blocked, mines get dropped. I can appreciate them attempting to use every part of the animal, so to speak, but there really just isn't enough to go around. The entire level is one small parking lot and a warehouse roughly the same size as the parking lot. The Combine barely even make an effort to stop you. They put two guys in through the top window and assume that they won't both get immediately gibbed by Gordon Freeman. The whole section is like trying to feed a family of five with a single potato. Sure, you can divide it five ways, but all that's gonna accomplish is keeping everyone hungry. Either you need to get more potatoes, or you need to limit the number of people you're feeding. You can't have it both ways. If your only goal is to make the game last longer, you may as well just put the player in front of a locked door that won't open until fifteen real-world minutes have passed.

It's certainly not bad, and I imagine that it being shorter than Forrest Gump is pulling a lot of weight in making me not dislike it. It's okay. There's ultimately so little here that it's impossible to really love it or hate it, and that might be the strongest condemnation of all.

Thank goodness Valve got all of those vehicle sections out of their system, so I definitely won't have to worry about them in Episode 2!

Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration does a great job at demonstrating the importance and impact of the earliest video games, including context for the video game crash in the 80's, interesting perspectives of developers of the company, and like five or six different versions of Missile Command.

I've gained a tremendous respect for the Atari 2600 as a system, and while a bit jank by today's standards, there are some actually excellent games on there. Adventure is cool. Haunted House is cool. The 2600 version of Missile Command is a stellar port.

I've also gained a hilarious level of understanding into how bad the Lynx and Jaguar systems were at the time, especially when compared with the SNES and Genesis. Technically very cool systems, but their original games weren't very good or fun. Tempest 2000 for the Jaguar barely counts in my eyes because it's a remake of the original arcade game, but I can't stress enough how genuinely fun that game is, even in the current year.

I wouldn't pay $150 in the 90's just for Tempest 2000.

Tremendous respect to Atari for showcasing some of the worst video games I've ever played. This is a genuine compliment. I'm being as real as I can be. Nintendo would never.

Anyway, thanks for inventing video games for us, Atari. Very cool. :)

People reviewing this recently are most likely reviewing the emulated version on Atari 50. And yeah, I respect that compilation as a museum collection but its nearly impossible to replicate this game outside of that original setup. One player sits in the cockpit and drives the front wheels of the truck while the 2nd player stands behind them looking at the screen over their head and controls the rear axle. Nothing else like it and a CPU can't replicate a person because your constantly blaming one another for the crashes. Great fun. Played at Funspot in NH.

(played as part of ATARI 50)

Quite nice for what it is - one of those simple, early top-down one-screen racing games. The controls are quite smooth, the sound is good, and the multiple tracks are actually quite thoughtfully designed to accommodate things like your car's top speed and the amount of cars in play.

I can't imagine how hectic this would be with eight players, though, and that actually brings up what's probably my only big issue with the gameplay. When you get bumped by another car you don't get nudged out of the way - to simulate the impact the game just turns your steering to one side or the other so you end up going off at right angle. This seems like not a great solution and is disorienting and tad unfair. With the computer AI cars that never touch each other, it's whatever, but with eight live players not particularly good at driving, I can imagine quite a shitshow and some real frustration.

When I was a junior in high school I failed Algebra II thanks to one of the rare truly awful teachers. Don’t get me wrong, I’m also math dumb, but until that point I’d gotten through solely because I’m the exact kind of smug underachiever teachers loved to give extra time to in order to unlock my potential or whatever, but this teacher was more content with just drawing the numbers on the white board and telling you to figure it out, none of that pesky teaching shit from them! So I failed Algebra II and had to retake it my senior year, no big deal right? Wrong, because in my state you had to complete three math credits to be eligible to graduate during the Lionel-Hutz-business-card-esque "No, Child Left Behind!" era. And since nobody in the office would believe me that this teacher was awful, I would be stuck with her for Algebra II, would inevitably fail, and would be forced to repeat and miss out on the dizzying excitement of community college.

The way I solved this problem was first trying to take pre-algebra, which lasted one class before the teacher realized she had me for geometry two years before which means I had to have passed Algebra I which means I couldn’t take Pre-Algebra. It was in the rules. But what I found wasn’t in the rules was that someone who already passed mainstream math classes couldn’t drop down into Basic Math, the remedial course. So thats what I did over the protestations of the school administration. Then, over the course of the year, what started off as a class of five ‘troubled’ sophomore kids and me, a troubled senior kid that wasn’t classified as such probably because I’m 'suburban' or at least good at manipulating authority figures, ballooned to include ten other seniors who didn’t want to risk being held back. The school finally noticed, and while I heard they closed that loophole for the next year, they also let the teacher go before they met tenure.

What does me pied pipering a bunch of schoolmates into a basic math course and getting a teacher canned right before an economic recession because I didn’t want to have to apply myself have to do with the Atari game Basic Math? Pretty much fucking nothing, I just wanted to go off on a tangent because I’m already regretting this ‘try and talk about every video game ever made’ gimmick. What the hell are you supposed to say about some of these early titles? Its a game where you do math. You solve equations against a solid colored background and get a beep sometimes. It might be the first uh math game? I’m not bothering looking that up. For the record, people thought this sucked contemporarily too which is hilarious because there were only three video games then.

The Motion Gravure releases are bad. They are a failed experiment utilizing new technology with very little to offer as either an interactive experience or a work of eroticism. BUT, they are also so incredibly bizarre to see; virtual nausea delivered straight to your eyeballs.

In this one, Harumi morphs and twists, body mutating, disfiguring. She points a gun at her head. Unlocked secret scenes appear over a pentagram, and when all are discovered, she bathes in milk.

Playing Motion Gravure is to experience something beyond us, something no person was ever meant to see. The camera cuts to the ocean waves, again and again, to which we will all return.

Read more here

It is both surprising to me and uplifting that the Ace Attorney trilogy found its way on its ending mark, a game that neatly ties all of its threads and themes set up and brings home the real deal on the nature of humanity, why we put ourselves on the line in the pursuit of truth. Not just the truth about others but also our own mindsets, biases, and understandings.

Trials and Tribulations threads the needle perfectly both in terms of characterization for all its major characters including new ones brought up, as well as general writing. The prose and charm is still at its top notch here, and it makes most sentences a delight to read, even at the game's lowest point. The casewriting is at its best, with good logical points to follow, and investigations that are well paced and make sense this time around. Breaking down testimony is still immensely satisfying as the solid music plays in the background.

There's really only one fumble to mention, that despite everything being set up so well and executed on with a perfect fashion, it still puts two mostly throw-away filler cases I can do without. 3-2 is tolerable, but 3-3 is so stupid that I go back and forth whether it was the stupidest shit to be added to this game in particular, or if it's just funny and self aware enough to be excused. Either way, there's a whole middle point that needs to be passed.

Even still, 3-1, 3-4, and 3-5 are where the bulk of the storytelling is and it's all a delight to read, managing to get me teary-eyed near the end as the case writing wrapped up. It was an amazing journey, a complete far cry from how I felt about the first two games. (9/10)

Tunic is a mess. It's an extreme puzzle soulslike zelda 1 mix that uses an antiquated gimmick, an in-game manual, as the main progression mechanic.

Tunic is too hard of a puzzle game if you want to play a soulslike, and too hard of a soulslike if you want to play a puzzle game. The Zelda comparison is fair, but only if you're talking about The Legends of Zelda, first of its name. I spent hours being lost not having a single clue where to go only to find out that I was simply walking past a door or a turn I was supposed to take.

The puzzle design in Tunic is frustrating, because the entire game is based on purposfully obscuring or not giving crucial information to the player. If you were to beat the game legitemately, you'd have to go through a lot of trial and error, not only on the soulslike part, but also on the puzzles. The game has 0 feedback for most puzzles you do, only vaguely indicating what you're supposed to be doing in the manual. The true ending, without a guide, is IMPOSSIBLE. There is no way someone can possibly find everything needed for the true ending without spending endless hours looking through every nook and crany of the map. Some people are into that, and it's their type of game, but I'm definitely not.

There's a crucial difference between Tunic and games like Outer Wilds. Outer Wilds guides the player via a command board that recaps not only what you already know in clear english, but also indicates connections between things you know in case you've missed them, while also guiding the player where to go explore next. You can look at the board, and figure out a destination. Tunic doesn't tell you where to go, only giving you slight hints, in a cryptic language in the manual. At some point, this becomes very discouraging, and I personally just used a guide. I'm very happy that I did so, because I would not be able to figure out what I'm supposed to do without a guide. To add insult to injury, after getting everything required for the true ending, the game bugged out and gave me the regular ending.

The soulslike elements of the game are lackluster as well. There is no variety of weapons, equips or items. There are a few useful items, and a few spells, and one sword. The equips you get are either gimmicky, either completely useless, either so good that you'll only be using a few given equips the entire game. Without the damage up defence down equip, I wouldn't have beaten the game in the time I did. The equips don't have a description, to fit the gimmick of the game, and are only vaguely described in the manual. This is a very bad thing, as most of the time you're unsure whether an equipment is even working properly. The bosses are all uninspired, the only boss I found enjoyable was the final boss. There are 0 humanoid fights, meaning that most of the time you'll be running around dodge rolling until the boss eventually lets you attack it. Only on the final boss do you get the chance to weave in attacks and dash out mid-combo when needed.

Overall, the game is just frustrating. It feels like it wasn't playtested enough, and has rough difficulty spikes and confusing puzzles all over. It felt more like I was fighting against the game the entire time, rather than playing it.

I had a good time with the game briefly but its gameplay really doesn’t have legs. The problem is that your only reward is cosmetics and frankly the costumes just don’t look that cool to make me want to earn them. The gameplay fundamentally just isn’t that varied though, leading quickly to irritation and boredom. Most of the time the minigames are variations of simon says, which aren’t that fun. The final rounds are usually the most novel gameplay-wise, with rockband-like rhythm minigames that are challenging.

I think the fundamental flaw is that the minigames are too similar and don’t allow very much interaction. The pigeons stand in one place and you follow button prompts. You can dance, but rarely anyone does. There’s no interaction between you and your fellow pigeons. I wish at the end of rounds you could send emotes to your opponents or if there was a simple chat box to say “gg” or something. It just feels sad when you’re playing with other humans and there is no communication. Just mindlessly following button prompts. Get in, get out.

That’s a big problem with multiplayer games in general for me. Everyone feels faceless. There’s no room for conversation or interaction. I miss the days where you could find transient friends in your teammates. Yes, that opened up the pandora’s box which easily led to the chat being filled with racist/sexist comments, but the alternative is emotionless and routine.

I do like some of the music of the game, but it quickly becomes repetitive like everything else.