tdstr
2021
Yes, I played the whole thing. All 4 endings. Having played it now, I'm totally unsurprised at the positive reception here (and on the broader internet) due to being written halfway-decently moment to moment, but man, y'all got fuckin psyopped into thinking a game about “fixing" an enby into being your doting submissive wife was good!
Ok, short review out of the way: Snoot Game is a parody/anti-fan-game of Goodbye Volcano High, a game which, as I am writing this review, is still a month or two off from release. GVH looks to be a story-driven graphic adventure game in the same indie niche as games like Night in the Woods and Life is Strange, and despite not being out, has earned quite a lot of ire from places on the net like 4chan. This revulsion is due to the fact... that it's a queer, furry, narrative-heavy game that showed up for a mere 1 minute and 35 seconds in some livestreamed PS5 showcase event. This bitter outrage and derision at something so mundane is nothing out of the ordinary for chanboards, but what followed was, at least in terms of scale.
Enter: Snoot Game. I’m not sure at what point in the development process they decided to focus on the de-transing and courting of Fang over making a “based” version of GVH, but in terms of playtime, this switch seems to happen somewhere about an hour or two into the game. This first section is pretty obviously terrible in a multitude of ways that’re impossible to ignore: the first line of text is a January 6th joke, which is followed up within a minute by the MC (named “Anon”) attempting to troll on a chanboard on his phone, there’s a teacher who speaks with a “comically” over the top Japanese accent (not pictured: the protagonist being like “huh? I can’t understand a single word this guy is saying…”). There is also a lot of blatant trans and enby-phobia on display in this section, from the protagonist accusing Fang of identifying as NB for attention to the constant mental misgendering of Fang with she/her pronouns (a trend which carries across pretty much the entire game, except for a short stint in one of the bad endings). Fang is shown as being short-tempered, rebellious, and is part of a band that sucks at playing music. Their bandmates and Fang’s only other friends at the school are a fentanyl addict, and a manipulative (rolls eyes) SJW Feminazi girl who goes around beating people up to let off her anger. This section also contains probably the single best “gotcha” moment against the writers of this game that I have ever seen within the span of only two textboxes, in the form of the MC complaining about the grammar of using singular “they” while also making two grammatical errors themselves within a single sentence.
But this section is just the opener and is, for the most part, the most spectacularly (read: obviously) bad Snoot Game gets. I think a lot of the people who shit on this game played or saw someone play this section, threw up their hands, and moved on. But not me! However, contrary to popular opinion that the rest of this game is “actually surprisingly heartwarming”, It’s also really bad, but in a much subtler and more insidious way.
There are lots of little things in which the game attempts to force you to accept its worldview to function. I already mentioned the internal monologue only referring to Fang with she/her, but as the story progresses, basically everyone in the game except the most "harmful influences" (Fang's 2 friends I mentioned earlier) switches to using she/her with no fanfare, including Fang's own brother. By the time you meet Fang’s parents everyone’s already switched to it, but they throw in the caveat of deadnaming Fang as well and reiterating that Fang is “just going through a phase” (something that the game later just tells you outright is true).
The sole SJW character from earlier, Trish, is probably the most blatantly propaganda-ish—she is also the only black-coded character, you know, just by happenstance (also Anon says she texts in “ebonics” in ending 1? which just doesn’t make any sense under the worldbuilding here, where species is just a substitute for race mostly? Very odd to fuck up your worldbuilding just to have your MC call something “ebonics”). In a particularly telling sequence of events, she pulls off a heist to embarrass Anon in front of everyone at school for the sole purpose of outcasting him from the band’s friend group, a tactic which succeeds at embarrassing Anon but fails at cleanly removing him from the friend group, as he takes Fang with him, something that Trish is shown at multiple points to be extremely angry about. This cements her (again, probably the only vaguely actively queer-positive main character left in the story at this point) as the “villain”, or at least, the single worst influence on Fang as a person.
There are 4 endings in Snoot Game (Spoilers from here on out! If you care about that, which you shouldn’t.), and only 2 in which Fang remains nonbinary. Of these endings, there is one where Fang shoots up the school, and the other leaves Fang (presumably) depressed, “looking like a junkie”, and with (gasp) tattoos, black lipstick, and a shaved head. During this second ending, which takes place 4 or 5 years after the events of most of the game, Anon thinks to himself that “I couldn’t save her (sic). Why would I save her? In her infinite talent can’t she see she’s a dump?”. Aside from the fact that all of Anon’s conclusions in ending 2 about Fang’s mental state are assumed to be true despite him having only seen them in passing at a restaurant (maybe Fang was just having a bad day or something, you never know), the only 2 endings which allow Fang to be nonbinary are also shown to be the “worst”. Take note of this!
In the other 2 endings, Fang switches back to using their old name (again, this is 4chan-written, so despite everyone else having birthnames like “Naser” and “Trish”, Fang’s birth name is “Lucy”. Real creative.) In these endings, Fang tells you something between that they were pretending to be nonbinary for attention, or that Trish drove them into it. (sidenote: Anon is able to switch almost instantly to calling Fang “Lucy” in both of these endings, despite only ever having known them as Fang. And yet switching names is simultaneously shown as something too confusing and hard for Fang’s parents to do. Interesting.) These are also the “best” endings. In one, Anon reunites with Fang years later and they have settled into a “motherly but still available” role helping out kids at the local church, so basically, the tradwife ending. And in the other one, and also the “best” ending in the game, Anon and Fang date for the rest of the year, break things off temporarily when Anon attends college, reunite after a time-skip and get married. Also, Fang is a schoolteacher in this one, which further reinforces the idea that for Fang to be happy, they need to not only detransition, but they need to take up the “traditionally female” role of being a caretaker. (Also, in one of the endings, you get the context that before Fang “started this whole non-binary deal” they were happier then too, so there’s another data point to correlate, I guess.)
Look—there’s nothing inherently wrong about writing a wish fulfillment romance story about a dominant and self-confident white guy finding his submissive caretaker white wife and living happily ever after. You do you bro. But there is something pretty fucky about presenting a traditional lifestyle as the ONLY path to happiness. And there’s something Extremely fucky about doing this by taking a queer character from someone else’s story, making your story about how de-transing them is the only way they can achieve happiness, and then releasing your story early in the hopes that your fanon interpretation supersedes whatever actually happens in the original source material.
But probably the most fucky is that a lot of this is subtextual and clearly is easily ignored by most, which allows its ideas to spread. Do not take me lightly by my saying that Snoot Game is propaganda, because it is. By word count, most of this game is just standard faire SoL wish fulfillment fantasy. Anon goes stargazing with Fang in one route, he goes to an aquarium with them in another. Normal shit. It’s just coupled with the added caveat of, you know, the whole arc of the game being dependent on the presumption of many of its characters that Fang’s trans-ness is just a phase, and that this presumption is ultimately proven correct. The shot is, (really, any number of bigotries, but most predominantly) transphobia and NB erasure, with SoL romance as a chaser. Again, really insidious shit.
This is why I feel uncomfortable giving this anything more than a 1/10. Snoot Game is generally paced well, has a lot of surprisingly decent music, and a lot of very well-done illustrations, but in service of what? Of fulfilling a delusional fantasy of “solving” someone’s trans-ness? Of spreading the idea that “if I just get them to fall in love with me, I can save them from their wicked ways (being queer)!” And of also spreading the idea that queer people are mentally ill and doomed to loneliness, lest they renounce their ways? Fuck riiiight off.
Ok, short review out of the way: Snoot Game is a parody/anti-fan-game of Goodbye Volcano High, a game which, as I am writing this review, is still a month or two off from release. GVH looks to be a story-driven graphic adventure game in the same indie niche as games like Night in the Woods and Life is Strange, and despite not being out, has earned quite a lot of ire from places on the net like 4chan. This revulsion is due to the fact... that it's a queer, furry, narrative-heavy game that showed up for a mere 1 minute and 35 seconds in some livestreamed PS5 showcase event. This bitter outrage and derision at something so mundane is nothing out of the ordinary for chanboards, but what followed was, at least in terms of scale.
Enter: Snoot Game. I’m not sure at what point in the development process they decided to focus on the de-transing and courting of Fang over making a “based” version of GVH, but in terms of playtime, this switch seems to happen somewhere about an hour or two into the game. This first section is pretty obviously terrible in a multitude of ways that’re impossible to ignore: the first line of text is a January 6th joke, which is followed up within a minute by the MC (named “Anon”) attempting to troll on a chanboard on his phone, there’s a teacher who speaks with a “comically” over the top Japanese accent (not pictured: the protagonist being like “huh? I can’t understand a single word this guy is saying…”). There is also a lot of blatant trans and enby-phobia on display in this section, from the protagonist accusing Fang of identifying as NB for attention to the constant mental misgendering of Fang with she/her pronouns (a trend which carries across pretty much the entire game, except for a short stint in one of the bad endings). Fang is shown as being short-tempered, rebellious, and is part of a band that sucks at playing music. Their bandmates and Fang’s only other friends at the school are a fentanyl addict, and a manipulative (rolls eyes) SJW Feminazi girl who goes around beating people up to let off her anger. This section also contains probably the single best “gotcha” moment against the writers of this game that I have ever seen within the span of only two textboxes, in the form of the MC complaining about the grammar of using singular “they” while also making two grammatical errors themselves within a single sentence.
But this section is just the opener and is, for the most part, the most spectacularly (read: obviously) bad Snoot Game gets. I think a lot of the people who shit on this game played or saw someone play this section, threw up their hands, and moved on. But not me! However, contrary to popular opinion that the rest of this game is “actually surprisingly heartwarming”, It’s also really bad, but in a much subtler and more insidious way.
There are lots of little things in which the game attempts to force you to accept its worldview to function. I already mentioned the internal monologue only referring to Fang with she/her, but as the story progresses, basically everyone in the game except the most "harmful influences" (Fang's 2 friends I mentioned earlier) switches to using she/her with no fanfare, including Fang's own brother. By the time you meet Fang’s parents everyone’s already switched to it, but they throw in the caveat of deadnaming Fang as well and reiterating that Fang is “just going through a phase” (something that the game later just tells you outright is true).
The sole SJW character from earlier, Trish, is probably the most blatantly propaganda-ish—she is also the only black-coded character, you know, just by happenstance (also Anon says she texts in “ebonics” in ending 1? which just doesn’t make any sense under the worldbuilding here, where species is just a substitute for race mostly? Very odd to fuck up your worldbuilding just to have your MC call something “ebonics”). In a particularly telling sequence of events, she pulls off a heist to embarrass Anon in front of everyone at school for the sole purpose of outcasting him from the band’s friend group, a tactic which succeeds at embarrassing Anon but fails at cleanly removing him from the friend group, as he takes Fang with him, something that Trish is shown at multiple points to be extremely angry about. This cements her (again, probably the only vaguely actively queer-positive main character left in the story at this point) as the “villain”, or at least, the single worst influence on Fang as a person.
There are 4 endings in Snoot Game (Spoilers from here on out! If you care about that, which you shouldn’t.), and only 2 in which Fang remains nonbinary. Of these endings, there is one where Fang shoots up the school, and the other leaves Fang (presumably) depressed, “looking like a junkie”, and with (gasp) tattoos, black lipstick, and a shaved head. During this second ending, which takes place 4 or 5 years after the events of most of the game, Anon thinks to himself that “I couldn’t save her (sic). Why would I save her? In her infinite talent can’t she see she’s a dump?”. Aside from the fact that all of Anon’s conclusions in ending 2 about Fang’s mental state are assumed to be true despite him having only seen them in passing at a restaurant (maybe Fang was just having a bad day or something, you never know), the only 2 endings which allow Fang to be nonbinary are also shown to be the “worst”. Take note of this!
In the other 2 endings, Fang switches back to using their old name (again, this is 4chan-written, so despite everyone else having birthnames like “Naser” and “Trish”, Fang’s birth name is “Lucy”. Real creative.) In these endings, Fang tells you something between that they were pretending to be nonbinary for attention, or that Trish drove them into it. (sidenote: Anon is able to switch almost instantly to calling Fang “Lucy” in both of these endings, despite only ever having known them as Fang. And yet switching names is simultaneously shown as something too confusing and hard for Fang’s parents to do. Interesting.) These are also the “best” endings. In one, Anon reunites with Fang years later and they have settled into a “motherly but still available” role helping out kids at the local church, so basically, the tradwife ending. And in the other one, and also the “best” ending in the game, Anon and Fang date for the rest of the year, break things off temporarily when Anon attends college, reunite after a time-skip and get married. Also, Fang is a schoolteacher in this one, which further reinforces the idea that for Fang to be happy, they need to not only detransition, but they need to take up the “traditionally female” role of being a caretaker. (Also, in one of the endings, you get the context that before Fang “started this whole non-binary deal” they were happier then too, so there’s another data point to correlate, I guess.)
Look—there’s nothing inherently wrong about writing a wish fulfillment romance story about a dominant and self-confident white guy finding his submissive caretaker white wife and living happily ever after. You do you bro. But there is something pretty fucky about presenting a traditional lifestyle as the ONLY path to happiness. And there’s something Extremely fucky about doing this by taking a queer character from someone else’s story, making your story about how de-transing them is the only way they can achieve happiness, and then releasing your story early in the hopes that your fanon interpretation supersedes whatever actually happens in the original source material.
But probably the most fucky is that a lot of this is subtextual and clearly is easily ignored by most, which allows its ideas to spread. Do not take me lightly by my saying that Snoot Game is propaganda, because it is. By word count, most of this game is just standard faire SoL wish fulfillment fantasy. Anon goes stargazing with Fang in one route, he goes to an aquarium with them in another. Normal shit. It’s just coupled with the added caveat of, you know, the whole arc of the game being dependent on the presumption of many of its characters that Fang’s trans-ness is just a phase, and that this presumption is ultimately proven correct. The shot is, (really, any number of bigotries, but most predominantly) transphobia and NB erasure, with SoL romance as a chaser. Again, really insidious shit.
This is why I feel uncomfortable giving this anything more than a 1/10. Snoot Game is generally paced well, has a lot of surprisingly decent music, and a lot of very well-done illustrations, but in service of what? Of fulfilling a delusional fantasy of “solving” someone’s trans-ness? Of spreading the idea that “if I just get them to fall in love with me, I can save them from their wicked ways (being queer)!” And of also spreading the idea that queer people are mentally ill and doomed to loneliness, lest they renounce their ways? Fuck riiiight off.
2022
I have no clue why but I guess you can play a fuckton of shitty mobile games with no ads in your browser now through YouTube??? Maybe these are supposed to have ads, this feels like a game that only exists to serve you ads, but my adblocker seems to have caught them anyways. So brave of Google to step up their game and give you keys jingling in an environment even more interactive than YouTube Shorts.
At level 20 the sky changes from blue to orange, and then at 40 it just alternates back. I locked into this for 30 minutes for a third color, God damn it
At level 20 the sky changes from blue to orange, and then at 40 it just alternates back. I locked into this for 30 minutes for a third color, God damn it
tries too hard to replicate the feeling of Minecraft Story Mode™, falls flat on its face. Sad!
2014
"im so depressed i dont have enough money to be creative and im worried about being forgotten by history!"
-Markus "Notch" Persson (Creator of Minecraft, the #1 Best Selling Video Game of All Time, and owner of a $70M mansion in Beverly Hills)
-Markus "Notch" Persson (Creator of Minecraft, the #1 Best Selling Video Game of All Time, and owner of a $70M mansion in Beverly Hills)
Peter: But since we're all gonna die, there's one more secret I feel I have to share with you. I did not care for Riven: The Sequel to Myst.
Lois: What?
Peter: Did not care for Riven.
Chris: How can you even say that, dad?
Peter: Didn't like- didn't like it.
Lois: Peter, it's so good! It- It's like the perfect game!
Peter: I- This is what everyone always says. Whenever they say...
Chris: Gehn, Catherine, I mean, you never see, Atrus!
Peter: Listen, I know, I- Fine. Fine. Fine character, did not like the game.
Brian: Why not?
Peter: Did not...couldn't get into it.
Lois: Explain yourself. What didn't you like about it?
Peter: It's too hard, Lois.
Lois: What?
Peter: It's too hard.
Lois: And you liked Myst?
Chris: Because it has good puzzles, it's allowed to be hard!
Peter: It takes forever getting anywhere; you spend like, you spend like six and a half hours riding minecarts. You can't try anything new without wasting a ton of time watching bridges lower or doors open... You know, I gave, I looked up the solution to both the animal stone puzzle and the marble grid puzzle.
Chris: You looked up the solution?!
Stewie: How can you say you don't like it if you haven't even played it properly?
Lois: I agree with Stewie. It's not really fair.
Chris: It's outrageous.
Peter: I spent two hours at the start of the game, marooned on Dome island with no clue where the hell I could go or what I could even do. I wrote down two pages of notes-
Lois: Yeah, that's what makes Riven good. I loved jotting down notes.
Peter: I eventually got irritated enough that I googled a hint guide. I had missed a lever at the side of one of the screens. Missing a lever is not a fun or interesting puzzle. It's an "everything is brown or gray" problem.
Lois: You know what, Peter,
Chris: You're supposed to use your eyes!
Lois: Riven is a masterclass of subtlety and immersion; it's something you don't understand.
Peter: I loved the part where you figured out the numbering system. That is my answer to that statement.
Lois: Exactly.
Peter: Well, there you go.
Lois: Whatever.
Chris: I liked that part too.
Lois: What?
Peter: Did not care for Riven.
Chris: How can you even say that, dad?
Peter: Didn't like- didn't like it.
Lois: Peter, it's so good! It- It's like the perfect game!
Peter: I- This is what everyone always says. Whenever they say...
Chris: Gehn, Catherine, I mean, you never see, Atrus!
Peter: Listen, I know, I- Fine. Fine. Fine character, did not like the game.
Brian: Why not?
Peter: Did not...couldn't get into it.
Lois: Explain yourself. What didn't you like about it?
Peter: It's too hard, Lois.
Lois: What?
Peter: It's too hard.
Lois: And you liked Myst?
Chris: Because it has good puzzles, it's allowed to be hard!
Peter: It takes forever getting anywhere; you spend like, you spend like six and a half hours riding minecarts. You can't try anything new without wasting a ton of time watching bridges lower or doors open... You know, I gave, I looked up the solution to both the animal stone puzzle and the marble grid puzzle.
Chris: You looked up the solution?!
Stewie: How can you say you don't like it if you haven't even played it properly?
Lois: I agree with Stewie. It's not really fair.
Chris: It's outrageous.
Peter: I spent two hours at the start of the game, marooned on Dome island with no clue where the hell I could go or what I could even do. I wrote down two pages of notes-
Lois: Yeah, that's what makes Riven good. I loved jotting down notes.
Peter: I eventually got irritated enough that I googled a hint guide. I had missed a lever at the side of one of the screens. Missing a lever is not a fun or interesting puzzle. It's an "everything is brown or gray" problem.
Lois: You know what, Peter,
Chris: You're supposed to use your eyes!
Lois: Riven is a masterclass of subtlety and immersion; it's something you don't understand.
Peter: I loved the part where you figured out the numbering system. That is my answer to that statement.
Lois: Exactly.
Peter: Well, there you go.
Lois: Whatever.
Chris: I liked that part too.
2015
i originally wrote a review of this that was basically just a stream of consciousness thought dump i had when i finished it (i'll put a pastebin in the comments) but it kind of goes over some themes and stuff that show up in the game that i think are cooler to discover yourself as you play, so i'm rewriting it (also because this game has been on my mind nonstop since i finished it and so i've had time to think about why i enjoyed it so much)
Echo is an extremely well written horror/character drama story--it's a little funny that this game filled with furries contains some of the most realistic and human writing i've seen in a story in quite some time. this is a very confrontational piece of art for something that vaguely looks like a dating sim; all of these characters have very real and lasting problems that you're not going to fix in the span of a week and the dynamics between all of them are all very very interesting, both to watch unfold and to pick apart after the fact.
and that's saying nothing about the horror in this game--it's extremely harrowing and it's constantly tense. echo likes to deliver both tense character moments and tense horror moments with a certain method of description, where each line of text is a successive gut punch after the last. it's a style of writing that fits the game really really well and makes the moments with lots of description or internal monologue really pop out. it's the sort of narrative where a simple plot summary misses a huge amount of what makes it good, and yet the rest of the story never feels like it's overburdened by level of detail.
i could gush about every aspect of this story for hours; how tightly-woven everything is, how it takes advantage of player expectations while making an effort to remain within its universe, how good the player choices are, but i think i should probably just stop for now and tell you to play this game. it's free. heed the content/age warnings, they're not a joke, this game can get pretty heavy at times. good luck.
--------------------------
1.01 edit: the short stories are cool, definitely play if you're wanting more from echo after you finish, but maybe wait a couple days/weeks as most of them are retellings of stories you hear about over the course of the main game. they're definitely not "necessary", but they capture the feel of the main game pretty well, certainly better than route 65
Echo is an extremely well written horror/character drama story--it's a little funny that this game filled with furries contains some of the most realistic and human writing i've seen in a story in quite some time. this is a very confrontational piece of art for something that vaguely looks like a dating sim; all of these characters have very real and lasting problems that you're not going to fix in the span of a week and the dynamics between all of them are all very very interesting, both to watch unfold and to pick apart after the fact.
and that's saying nothing about the horror in this game--it's extremely harrowing and it's constantly tense. echo likes to deliver both tense character moments and tense horror moments with a certain method of description, where each line of text is a successive gut punch after the last. it's a style of writing that fits the game really really well and makes the moments with lots of description or internal monologue really pop out. it's the sort of narrative where a simple plot summary misses a huge amount of what makes it good, and yet the rest of the story never feels like it's overburdened by level of detail.
i could gush about every aspect of this story for hours; how tightly-woven everything is, how it takes advantage of player expectations while making an effort to remain within its universe, how good the player choices are, but i think i should probably just stop for now and tell you to play this game. it's free. heed the content/age warnings, they're not a joke, this game can get pretty heavy at times. good luck.
--------------------------
1.01 edit: the short stories are cool, definitely play if you're wanting more from echo after you finish, but maybe wait a couple days/weeks as most of them are retellings of stories you hear about over the course of the main game. they're definitely not "necessary", but they capture the feel of the main game pretty well, certainly better than route 65
Despite what you might believe given my profile picture, I've never really cared for the mainline Pokémon series. I don't think before this game I had finished a single one--maybe HeartGold? I played it too young to really remember any of it, and any attempt to play any game in the series after that point would be pretty quickly abandoned, lasting at longest maybe 5 or 10 hours.
It wasn’t until I’d played most of the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon spinoff games back in 2020 that I actually started actually giving a shit about Pokémon, the media franchise. The PMD games are honestly home to some of the best stuff you’re going to be getting out of a game under the “Pokémon” label: engaging stories, absolutely stellar soundtracks, and fun gameplay to boot (I know this last one’s a bit more contentious, but I honestly prefer the faster-paced grid-based combat of those games to the standard turn-based affair you’ll see in mainline). They’re honestly the only reason I even wanted to give this one a shot in the first place, but I think the similarities between the two franchises are overstated a lot.
Anyways, onto Arceus. Pokémon Legends: Arceus has been marketed, both by Nintendo and by fans, as a breath of fresh air into a stale franchise—revamped everything. And after playing it, I can’t exactly say that’s true? Sure, you can throw Pokéballs at Pokémon on the overworld, but other than that? There isn’t really much new here, aside from the “open world” (which is pretty empty and lacking overall), and the rest is just your standard turn-based affair. It feels like a slightly different container on the same game that’s been sold for years.
Before I get into my criticisms, I feel like I should talk a bit about the part of the game that’s actually good; catching and battling Pokémon. Mechanically, they got this mostly right, although I have some gripes with how most battles end in you being one-shot by the enemy, or you one-shotting them. But that’s mostly a minor nitpick, and I would say this part of the game is still generally mostly fun. Sneaking through the grass and trying to snipe a Pokémon is genuinely a pretty entertaining part of the game. I also thought the boss fights were pretty fun, apparently this is less common of an opinion, but, like, dodge-rolling and timing i-frames was pretty fun to me.
I know some people might be reading this, surprised, thinking, “well, that’s the whole point of a Pokémon game!” and, again, I’d like to reiterate that I’m coming at this from the perspective of having played the PMD games first—story is given a pretty huge focus in those games, and the whiplash of coming back to a mainline with an almost entirely unimportant and unnecessary story is felt in full force. It's like the part of Nier Replicant before that game gets good, where you’re just running from point A to point B to go kill something. Whereas that game has purpose and a point in its drudgery, this game certainly does not; every story beat serves zero purpose other than to get you to go to some area and fight some boss, and the game really just does not care about hiding that fact.
And that last bit—about the game not caring—is a sort of through-line with most of my criticisms. Constantly while playing this game, I just kept thinking to myself “this is the largest grossing media franchise in the world??” And I guess it makes sense, you don’t make it to #1 without cutting a lot of costs, but like, come on. The most obvious complaint is how ugly the game is. It’s not really an observation most people miss, but yeah, it’s a really, really ugly game. You can’t blame it on the hardware because there are plenty of switch games that are eons above this one—It’s hard to believe that this is on the same system as Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey, and that both of those games released over 4 years before this one.
Another aspect it’s sorely lacking in is music: to my understanding, most of it is just stuff recycled from Diamond and Pearl. I’m not even going to call them remixes—It’s painfully obvious that they just slapped in the MIDIs they had of the existing songs into some modern DAW and replaced all the instruments with some off-the-shelf Orchestra VST #4. But that’s only half of the game; the other half takes the BOTW approach and just has… no music. Just utter silence. And it doesn’t feel like an artistic choice as it does in BOTW, it’s not like there are reactive bits in the music that come in when you do certain things, it’s just complete silence. They couldn’t be arsed to midislap more than 15 or so songs, so they just gave up and turned off the music anytime you’re not in a battle. There’s tons of other corners cut in this game, from lackluster animations, to a weirdly cumbersome inventory system, it’s kind of ever-present throughout the entire experience.
This is what crunch looks like, in case you’re wondering. Were this game to have some more time in the oven I’d like to think a lot of these issues could have been remedied, hell, maybe they could use some of that $82 billion in merchandising revenue to hire an orchestra or something, but part of me thinks that this lack of giving a shit is a deliberate choice from higher-ups at the Pokémon Company.
Do they even really have to try? As long as it plays decently, it’s gonna be one of the best selling games on the switch. Hell, it doesn’t even have to be that great; Sword and Shield was critically panned on release and still sold 23 million copies. Let’s Go Pikachu/Eevee is basically the definition of mediocrity, and it still sold 14 million. The Pokémon Company knows this, that they don’t have to try and they’ll still make bank off of brand name alone, and so they don’t. And this comes from a place of knowing that good shit can be made if they got off their asses and maybe tried a bit. The PMD games are great! There’s no reason to say this is any sort of unsalvageable franchise, and there’s no reason to say shit like “better things aren’t possible” because they are, and they already exist.
Notably absent in PMD’s development is Game Freak, as those games are made by a team over at Spike Chunsoft; is it any wonder that they obviously have so much more care put into them? And it’s not just PMD, Pokémon ranger is dope too despite mostly just being a series where you draw circles over and over… and it’s developed by HAL Labs. There are plenty of examples of Pokémon done right, and surprise surprise, they’re all done by companies other than Game Freak. It’s just frustrating that a series that has all this potential, all of these possible greats of all time, is mostly just used for a quick buck by the teams getting the most resources.
The only way this changes is if people wisen up and stop buying these, but I doubt that’s gonna happen anytime soon. It’s reached the point where the Pokémon name is just so culturally huge that no amount of Gamers who want their silly little videogames to have effort put into them are going to counterbalance the number of parents who need a Christmas present for their kid, and they know what Pokémon is so they’ll just buy that. I don’t know. I just kind of wish people asked more of their Corporate Media Conglomerates
It wasn’t until I’d played most of the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon spinoff games back in 2020 that I actually started actually giving a shit about Pokémon, the media franchise. The PMD games are honestly home to some of the best stuff you’re going to be getting out of a game under the “Pokémon” label: engaging stories, absolutely stellar soundtracks, and fun gameplay to boot (I know this last one’s a bit more contentious, but I honestly prefer the faster-paced grid-based combat of those games to the standard turn-based affair you’ll see in mainline). They’re honestly the only reason I even wanted to give this one a shot in the first place, but I think the similarities between the two franchises are overstated a lot.
Anyways, onto Arceus. Pokémon Legends: Arceus has been marketed, both by Nintendo and by fans, as a breath of fresh air into a stale franchise—revamped everything. And after playing it, I can’t exactly say that’s true? Sure, you can throw Pokéballs at Pokémon on the overworld, but other than that? There isn’t really much new here, aside from the “open world” (which is pretty empty and lacking overall), and the rest is just your standard turn-based affair. It feels like a slightly different container on the same game that’s been sold for years.
Before I get into my criticisms, I feel like I should talk a bit about the part of the game that’s actually good; catching and battling Pokémon. Mechanically, they got this mostly right, although I have some gripes with how most battles end in you being one-shot by the enemy, or you one-shotting them. But that’s mostly a minor nitpick, and I would say this part of the game is still generally mostly fun. Sneaking through the grass and trying to snipe a Pokémon is genuinely a pretty entertaining part of the game. I also thought the boss fights were pretty fun, apparently this is less common of an opinion, but, like, dodge-rolling and timing i-frames was pretty fun to me.
I know some people might be reading this, surprised, thinking, “well, that’s the whole point of a Pokémon game!” and, again, I’d like to reiterate that I’m coming at this from the perspective of having played the PMD games first—story is given a pretty huge focus in those games, and the whiplash of coming back to a mainline with an almost entirely unimportant and unnecessary story is felt in full force. It's like the part of Nier Replicant before that game gets good, where you’re just running from point A to point B to go kill something. Whereas that game has purpose and a point in its drudgery, this game certainly does not; every story beat serves zero purpose other than to get you to go to some area and fight some boss, and the game really just does not care about hiding that fact.
And that last bit—about the game not caring—is a sort of through-line with most of my criticisms. Constantly while playing this game, I just kept thinking to myself “this is the largest grossing media franchise in the world??” And I guess it makes sense, you don’t make it to #1 without cutting a lot of costs, but like, come on. The most obvious complaint is how ugly the game is. It’s not really an observation most people miss, but yeah, it’s a really, really ugly game. You can’t blame it on the hardware because there are plenty of switch games that are eons above this one—It’s hard to believe that this is on the same system as Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey, and that both of those games released over 4 years before this one.
Another aspect it’s sorely lacking in is music: to my understanding, most of it is just stuff recycled from Diamond and Pearl. I’m not even going to call them remixes—It’s painfully obvious that they just slapped in the MIDIs they had of the existing songs into some modern DAW and replaced all the instruments with some off-the-shelf Orchestra VST #4. But that’s only half of the game; the other half takes the BOTW approach and just has… no music. Just utter silence. And it doesn’t feel like an artistic choice as it does in BOTW, it’s not like there are reactive bits in the music that come in when you do certain things, it’s just complete silence. They couldn’t be arsed to midislap more than 15 or so songs, so they just gave up and turned off the music anytime you’re not in a battle. There’s tons of other corners cut in this game, from lackluster animations, to a weirdly cumbersome inventory system, it’s kind of ever-present throughout the entire experience.
This is what crunch looks like, in case you’re wondering. Were this game to have some more time in the oven I’d like to think a lot of these issues could have been remedied, hell, maybe they could use some of that $82 billion in merchandising revenue to hire an orchestra or something, but part of me thinks that this lack of giving a shit is a deliberate choice from higher-ups at the Pokémon Company.
Do they even really have to try? As long as it plays decently, it’s gonna be one of the best selling games on the switch. Hell, it doesn’t even have to be that great; Sword and Shield was critically panned on release and still sold 23 million copies. Let’s Go Pikachu/Eevee is basically the definition of mediocrity, and it still sold 14 million. The Pokémon Company knows this, that they don’t have to try and they’ll still make bank off of brand name alone, and so they don’t. And this comes from a place of knowing that good shit can be made if they got off their asses and maybe tried a bit. The PMD games are great! There’s no reason to say this is any sort of unsalvageable franchise, and there’s no reason to say shit like “better things aren’t possible” because they are, and they already exist.
Notably absent in PMD’s development is Game Freak, as those games are made by a team over at Spike Chunsoft; is it any wonder that they obviously have so much more care put into them? And it’s not just PMD, Pokémon ranger is dope too despite mostly just being a series where you draw circles over and over… and it’s developed by HAL Labs. There are plenty of examples of Pokémon done right, and surprise surprise, they’re all done by companies other than Game Freak. It’s just frustrating that a series that has all this potential, all of these possible greats of all time, is mostly just used for a quick buck by the teams getting the most resources.
The only way this changes is if people wisen up and stop buying these, but I doubt that’s gonna happen anytime soon. It’s reached the point where the Pokémon name is just so culturally huge that no amount of Gamers who want their silly little videogames to have effort put into them are going to counterbalance the number of parents who need a Christmas present for their kid, and they know what Pokémon is so they’ll just buy that. I don’t know. I just kind of wish people asked more of their Corporate Media Conglomerates
2001
friday night fuckin if it was good
1998
having finally gotten around to MGS it's so immediately clear why it's so revered by almost everyone who touches it.
in many aspects it's still groundbreaking even today--the story, presentation, dialogue, voice acting... it's all still beating the fuck out of most "cinematic" games even now, over 25 years later. there's certainly plenty of "snake objectifies women" moments, but they stop appearing not that far in and even manage to get retroactive justification with the further development of Snake as a character, like talk about being on lock. and in 1998! fuckin, like 50% of AAA games still dont get good voice acting and this game had incredible voice acting when that number was looking more like 95%. how the hell...
unfortunately, it really pains me to say that time has not been kind to the gameplay here in the slightest. at its best moments it never gets any better than what you could get out of a Escape The Classroom When The Teacher Isnt Looking flash game--the backtracking isnt really all that bad (except on those god damn stairs), but my biggest gripe is that like 80% of the game is actually played by looking at the tiny map in the top right corner. you got all this screen real estate but it mostly goes to mechanical waste since the actual mechanics of it--the stuff you're actually doing--is communicated with much more clarity and spatial awareness with that tiny minimap. i've never really considered myself much of a stealth fan but even then i've probably been spoiled by modern stealth games, which are much more complicated and can get away with just showing you the world as-is since the interactions and visibilities are assumable with a good degree of confidence. that isn't the case here though, since it's all simple cones of vision that you mostly just have to walk around.
the combat generally kinda sucks too, now this is something im a little more willing to forgive given the themes tackled here and how you're generally supposed to avoid combat anyways, but also, you gotta do those boss fights and most of them are reeeeally bad. pretty much all of them have some stupid gimmick you're supposed to butt your head against until you figure it out, which is a mode of play that's gone from extremely popular to extremely niche in the past few decades. this whole ethos is what defined a lot of old school western adventure games and its probably also why i think most of them suck shit tbh... visual novels win... but that's beside the point, i think no one could have predicted the internet becoming what it has, and making the question of "how to beat sniper wolf mgs1" a simple google search away. which turns that point in the game from an excuse to backtrack and go exploring and extend your playtime with your brand newly purchased video game into what at its worst feels like a guided tour. this is no fault of MGS, its the fault of the world for changing around it...
but all that said, if you can get past the gameplay (its not really that bad its just okay most of the time and bearable with sparing guide use and savestate spam in a few particularly annoying boss fights) there really is a hell of a lot to chew on here. very very excited to dive into the later games within this series as they will probably have better gameplay (i do recall vaguely having fun with MGS5 for a brief while early on in high school before I got stuck on some mission and couldn't progress), as well as kojima's older ADV work like snatcher and policenauts... i've never played a kojima to credits and while i am kind of kicking myself for not doing it earlier, this does feel like probably the best place to finally start on that journey and i'm not sure a less Video Game Experienced version of myself coulda truly appreciated just how groundbreaking this was in context of the time.
in many aspects it's still groundbreaking even today--the story, presentation, dialogue, voice acting... it's all still beating the fuck out of most "cinematic" games even now, over 25 years later. there's certainly plenty of "snake objectifies women" moments, but they stop appearing not that far in and even manage to get retroactive justification with the further development of Snake as a character, like talk about being on lock. and in 1998! fuckin, like 50% of AAA games still dont get good voice acting and this game had incredible voice acting when that number was looking more like 95%. how the hell...
unfortunately, it really pains me to say that time has not been kind to the gameplay here in the slightest. at its best moments it never gets any better than what you could get out of a Escape The Classroom When The Teacher Isnt Looking flash game--the backtracking isnt really all that bad (except on those god damn stairs), but my biggest gripe is that like 80% of the game is actually played by looking at the tiny map in the top right corner. you got all this screen real estate but it mostly goes to mechanical waste since the actual mechanics of it--the stuff you're actually doing--is communicated with much more clarity and spatial awareness with that tiny minimap. i've never really considered myself much of a stealth fan but even then i've probably been spoiled by modern stealth games, which are much more complicated and can get away with just showing you the world as-is since the interactions and visibilities are assumable with a good degree of confidence. that isn't the case here though, since it's all simple cones of vision that you mostly just have to walk around.
the combat generally kinda sucks too, now this is something im a little more willing to forgive given the themes tackled here and how you're generally supposed to avoid combat anyways, but also, you gotta do those boss fights and most of them are reeeeally bad. pretty much all of them have some stupid gimmick you're supposed to butt your head against until you figure it out, which is a mode of play that's gone from extremely popular to extremely niche in the past few decades. this whole ethos is what defined a lot of old school western adventure games and its probably also why i think most of them suck shit tbh... visual novels win... but that's beside the point, i think no one could have predicted the internet becoming what it has, and making the question of "how to beat sniper wolf mgs1" a simple google search away. which turns that point in the game from an excuse to backtrack and go exploring and extend your playtime with your brand newly purchased video game into what at its worst feels like a guided tour. this is no fault of MGS, its the fault of the world for changing around it...
but all that said, if you can get past the gameplay (its not really that bad its just okay most of the time and bearable with sparing guide use and savestate spam in a few particularly annoying boss fights) there really is a hell of a lot to chew on here. very very excited to dive into the later games within this series as they will probably have better gameplay (i do recall vaguely having fun with MGS5 for a brief while early on in high school before I got stuck on some mission and couldn't progress), as well as kojima's older ADV work like snatcher and policenauts... i've never played a kojima to credits and while i am kind of kicking myself for not doing it earlier, this does feel like probably the best place to finally start on that journey and i'm not sure a less Video Game Experienced version of myself coulda truly appreciated just how groundbreaking this was in context of the time.
It's not an uncommon sentiment that Kodaka might be a hack but Rain Code is pretty much the only confirmation I've ever needed. I loved DRV3 and pretty heartily enjoyed DR1 and 2 and yet I am now completely convinced he stumbled into a great whodunnit setup with Danganronpa and, when tasked with making a spiritual successor, had no clue what made those games appealing and stumbled into whatever the fuck this is.
Rain Code isn't as offensive as something like Ultra Despair Girls but it feels so, so much more confused. An exercise in futility. I kind of don't even know where to start. There's just so many things wrong here it's kind of funny, and I don't think there's literally any way to structure this other than a bullet point list. So here's that bullet point list.
- It's danganronpa but without most of the things that make Danganronpa good.
- This game is filled with what I like to call "Adventure Game Bloat". One problem I have with a lot of adventure games (not all, but many) is that they just feel like visual novels with menial walking gameplay grafted onto them, and this game's no exception. Lots of very boring and trivial "walk over here and press A" quests that really don't add anything.
- This bloat continues into this game's version of Danganronpa's Class Trials (known here as Mystery Labyrinths) which are filled with completely empty and straight hallways which just serve as places you have to hear dialogue all the way through. That, and repetitions of the same couple of animations over and over again.
- The Labyrinths have even more stilted and shoehorned in gameplay than the Danganronpa games ever have. The debates are only partially the focus now and most of it's just repackaged multiple choice questions. Very lame.
- The stakes and tension are so poorly established, compared to Dangan which is immediately "you are trapped in a death game. Good luck!". Here you are given the vague goal of "Figure out Kanai Ward's Secret" but you don't even begin to actually really tackle it until well past the halfway point, everything else is just futzing around with other random mysteries.
- The vast majority of cases here are functionally self-contained, which is like, really fucking stupid coming from Danganronpa! One of the best things about that is how each case reduced the number of culprits for the next one, as the map expands and creates more possible murder sites. Murders in one chapter create motives for the next. It's a well-oiled whodunnit machine if I've ever seen one. Here, though, more often than not, characters are introduced for a single chapter's mystery as suspects and stop existing the second the next chapter starts. It feels insanely artificial, even moreso than the Phoenix Wright games (which I also have this problem with, but) which at least have the courtesy to have a good deal of witnesses show up again later at least in some minor cameo capacity. Basically everyone linked to the first couple cases do not fucking exist even in the slightest once their respective chapters end, lol.
- None of the characters are even like kind of interesting. Literally the best ones are just the most neutral and tolerable (Yakio, Wendy, Halara), everyone else is annoying or boring or both. The protagonists are one-dimensional anime archetypes and so are the villains. Makoto (a fairly important character who is only introduced to you halfway through the game, lol) is maybe the only exception, but I still saw the one thing that makes him interesting coming from a mile away.
- Shinigami and Yuma get the most screentime and they are among the most annoying and boring characters respectively. People overplay this as a thing that sucks here (it certainly isn't great if your leads are uncompelling!) but it's not even nearly the worst part of this game, since this game could have easily fallen back on the puzzle solving.
- The mysteries just aren't very good. I solved nearly all of them, like, an hour before their mystery labyrinths finished. The first case I literally solved during the investigation period and had to wait 2 hours as the mystery labyrinth slowly trudged through the solution. I presume this isn't as bad if you haven't played as many mystery games, but everything just feels recycled from everywhere else. Oh, they did this in Danganronpa. Oh, they did this in Umineko. And so on. That, and some incredibly obvious foreshadowing stuff that completely shatters many of the mysteries if you even vaguely know what Chekhov's Gun is.
- The few (and I mean few) times I didn't immediately know the answer to a question, the Mystery Labyrinth basically just tells you the answer anyways. You have so much health that failure in a dungeon is like, never even a slight consideration.
- It is insane how many times this game threatens to shake up the status quo and never meaningfully follows up. As previously mentioned, characters get introduced which seem like a signifier that the story's going in an interesting direction and by the end of a chapter it Always goes back to the game's formula it set early on.
- Already mentioned by another reviewer but every even slightly interesting thing is undermined by something else. Any complicated decision or interesting piece of morality is almost always noped out of for some reason or another. There are so many obviously interesting avenues this game could have taken and it seems to deliberately avoid every single one.
- Multiple of the most important pieces of info for the last chapter are established mere minutes before it starts. I know I just complained about how blatant the foreshadowing is here but maybe it could have worked better if there was more than one piece of it floating around at any given time.
- The last chapter is the funniest fucking shit ever and it's definitely the only part of the game that isn't trying to be.
- The soundtrack kind of sucks. I suspect Takada phoned this one in since he's done some really great composition on other games, even recently (I loved his work on Death Come True) but every track here is obviously just a soundalike of some other track from Danganronpa or something that feels completely out of place. There's some decent dark ambient in the last chapter but most of this game's OST consists of stuff like the main theme (very obviously just the Danganronpa theme but with some of the notes swapped around) or that really boring song with the trap hihats.
- They're still doing something wrong when it comes to translating this artstyle into 3D. It doesn't look as bad as UDG but it still certainly looks off, probably something to do with the shading. Or the mo-capp-y animations. Idk.
- It runs like shit. Bizarre to keep this one a Switch exclusive when it often can't even crack 20 fps and often throws you into long-ass load screens. Legitimately the best way to play this as of writing is with an emulator and a 60fps 1080p mod.
Anyways this is pretty bad! Confident in saying that every change from the mainline Dangan games is for the worse here. Chapter 4 is okay and chapter 5 is at the very least entertaining but the rest is very sludge. Probably don't bother!
Rain Code isn't as offensive as something like Ultra Despair Girls but it feels so, so much more confused. An exercise in futility. I kind of don't even know where to start. There's just so many things wrong here it's kind of funny, and I don't think there's literally any way to structure this other than a bullet point list. So here's that bullet point list.
- It's danganronpa but without most of the things that make Danganronpa good.
- This game is filled with what I like to call "Adventure Game Bloat". One problem I have with a lot of adventure games (not all, but many) is that they just feel like visual novels with menial walking gameplay grafted onto them, and this game's no exception. Lots of very boring and trivial "walk over here and press A" quests that really don't add anything.
- This bloat continues into this game's version of Danganronpa's Class Trials (known here as Mystery Labyrinths) which are filled with completely empty and straight hallways which just serve as places you have to hear dialogue all the way through. That, and repetitions of the same couple of animations over and over again.
- The Labyrinths have even more stilted and shoehorned in gameplay than the Danganronpa games ever have. The debates are only partially the focus now and most of it's just repackaged multiple choice questions. Very lame.
- The stakes and tension are so poorly established, compared to Dangan which is immediately "you are trapped in a death game. Good luck!". Here you are given the vague goal of "Figure out Kanai Ward's Secret" but you don't even begin to actually really tackle it until well past the halfway point, everything else is just futzing around with other random mysteries.
- The vast majority of cases here are functionally self-contained, which is like, really fucking stupid coming from Danganronpa! One of the best things about that is how each case reduced the number of culprits for the next one, as the map expands and creates more possible murder sites. Murders in one chapter create motives for the next. It's a well-oiled whodunnit machine if I've ever seen one. Here, though, more often than not, characters are introduced for a single chapter's mystery as suspects and stop existing the second the next chapter starts. It feels insanely artificial, even moreso than the Phoenix Wright games (which I also have this problem with, but) which at least have the courtesy to have a good deal of witnesses show up again later at least in some minor cameo capacity. Basically everyone linked to the first couple cases do not fucking exist even in the slightest once their respective chapters end, lol.
- None of the characters are even like kind of interesting. Literally the best ones are just the most neutral and tolerable (Yakio, Wendy, Halara), everyone else is annoying or boring or both. The protagonists are one-dimensional anime archetypes and so are the villains. Makoto (a fairly important character who is only introduced to you halfway through the game, lol) is maybe the only exception, but I still saw the one thing that makes him interesting coming from a mile away.
- Shinigami and Yuma get the most screentime and they are among the most annoying and boring characters respectively. People overplay this as a thing that sucks here (it certainly isn't great if your leads are uncompelling!) but it's not even nearly the worst part of this game, since this game could have easily fallen back on the puzzle solving.
- The mysteries just aren't very good. I solved nearly all of them, like, an hour before their mystery labyrinths finished. The first case I literally solved during the investigation period and had to wait 2 hours as the mystery labyrinth slowly trudged through the solution. I presume this isn't as bad if you haven't played as many mystery games, but everything just feels recycled from everywhere else. Oh, they did this in Danganronpa. Oh, they did this in Umineko. And so on. That, and some incredibly obvious foreshadowing stuff that completely shatters many of the mysteries if you even vaguely know what Chekhov's Gun is.
- The few (and I mean few) times I didn't immediately know the answer to a question, the Mystery Labyrinth basically just tells you the answer anyways. You have so much health that failure in a dungeon is like, never even a slight consideration.
- It is insane how many times this game threatens to shake up the status quo and never meaningfully follows up. As previously mentioned, characters get introduced which seem like a signifier that the story's going in an interesting direction and by the end of a chapter it Always goes back to the game's formula it set early on.
- Already mentioned by another reviewer but every even slightly interesting thing is undermined by something else. Any complicated decision or interesting piece of morality is almost always noped out of for some reason or another. There are so many obviously interesting avenues this game could have taken and it seems to deliberately avoid every single one.
- Multiple of the most important pieces of info for the last chapter are established mere minutes before it starts. I know I just complained about how blatant the foreshadowing is here but maybe it could have worked better if there was more than one piece of it floating around at any given time.
- The last chapter is the funniest fucking shit ever and it's definitely the only part of the game that isn't trying to be.
- The soundtrack kind of sucks. I suspect Takada phoned this one in since he's done some really great composition on other games, even recently (I loved his work on Death Come True) but every track here is obviously just a soundalike of some other track from Danganronpa or something that feels completely out of place. There's some decent dark ambient in the last chapter but most of this game's OST consists of stuff like the main theme (very obviously just the Danganronpa theme but with some of the notes swapped around) or that really boring song with the trap hihats.
- They're still doing something wrong when it comes to translating this artstyle into 3D. It doesn't look as bad as UDG but it still certainly looks off, probably something to do with the shading. Or the mo-capp-y animations. Idk.
- It runs like shit. Bizarre to keep this one a Switch exclusive when it often can't even crack 20 fps and often throws you into long-ass load screens. Legitimately the best way to play this as of writing is with an emulator and a 60fps 1080p mod.
Anyways this is pretty bad! Confident in saying that every change from the mainline Dangan games is for the worse here. Chapter 4 is okay and chapter 5 is at the very least entertaining but the rest is very sludge. Probably don't bother!
2017
why do i have to be rude to my friends
===================
year and a half later edit (not really a proper review just organizing some thoughts i have about nitw and a similar game):
been thinking about this one a lot recently. not because i've really changed my opinion or love it now, but because it feels like such wasted potential. forgive me if this one is hard to read, my thoughts about this game are very tangled and laying them out in a way that makes sense is difficult
one of my favorite games of all time, echo (a free vn basically no one has played but i digress), has nearly all the same building blocks as night in the woods. you've got:
-vaguely a coming of age story
-about coming back to your rural dead-end hometown from college
-reuniting with your old friend group, hanging out & talking with them
-you get to choose who to hang out with & get different content based on who you pick
-a member of the friend group is gone, you progressively figure out what happened to them and why
-pretty gay and pretty "indie furry", in a way that deters a lot of the people not in the target demographic from ever trying it.
i could go on but i won't because that would land itself in spoiler territory for one or both, but if you've played both they should reveal themselves to be very similar in premise. there's enough differences to matter but my point is that they're 2 games that are so easy to compare to one another that one could do it with nothing but the first sentence of each game's product descriptions. so why do i love echo as much as i do, and not really care for nitw as much as i do? for me, the answer lies entirely within execution.
thought 1: i feel like the biggest sticking point for me is how nitw handles emotion, that being, it barely does. which for a game all about talking to people is pretty bad! often the most you'll get is a character narrowing or opening their eyes a bit more and dryly delivering an "oh my god" or a "no fucking way", but the character sprites barely emote, and there's no descriptive text that lets you fill in the details. echo at least has your standard neutral/happy/angry/etc visual novely sprites for each character, but where that game shines is in its text descriptions. the combination of these two does wonders for the believability of that game's world and its characters--it's really no wonder why so many games about talking to people opt for a visual novel format. contrast that to nitw, where every character talks like they're texting one another. people don't talk like this, they type like this, which is a very important distinction to be made, and i couldn't help but be pulled out of the experience any time i noticed it.
thought 2: night in the woods often emphasizes the fact that possum springs is a dead end town no one really wants to live in, but aside from the text there's really nothing backing it up. for a town as "shitty" as everyone thinks it is, it looks way too pleasant to exist within. night in the woods is simply too pretty for what it's going for. if you want to say that the game is actually about how this small town isn't actually that bad, might i point you to some plot beats that happen in the story that directly contradict that? contrast that to echo, which isnt nearly as wishy-washy about how it wants to present the town; it's oppressively hot, most of the houses are vacant or abandoned, everything is barren or messy or grimy or all of the above, the game goes the whole nine yards. the refuge from this is in the friendships the mc has formed, and when things go badly you can't just escape to "oh look at how pretty the game is", it's all laid bare in a way you can't ignore. night in the woods clearly wants to tug on your emotional strings, but it's missing any sort of bite, which leads me pretty cleanly to my next point...
thought 3: to me, night in the woods feels conflicted in what it wants to be. nitw is a cozy game where you hang out with your friends but it's also a game that delves into the troubles that can befall a freindship, particularly in bea's events (i will mention that i only played one or two of greggs when i played the game so i can't really comment on them). this is all good and fine, but the issue is that the game is too scared to let go of the "cozy" descriptor, so things happen that should have an effect on the dynamics of the friend group, but end up changing basically nothing. i'm not sure how much of a spoiler this is, but regardless of whether you choose to hang out with bea or gregg, the narrative converges towards the same point in the end as a plot starts to take center focus. this unintentionally kind of says that it doesn't really matter what you say to the people around you and if you never hang out with them, that they'll still be your friends, which feels... wrong? like that can't be what they're going for, right? mae is allowed to be at best a total klutz and at worst actively malicious towards the people around her and no one really minds all that much in the long run.
it all comes down to narrative goals; night in the woods tells the player "it's ok to be confused about life in your early 20s" but there's so many extraneous elements that this idea is often shoved to the wayside. once the plot gets going it's basically completely gone as a theme. contrast this with echo, which, to be vague as to not thematically spoil it, has an undercurrent of "trauma" that the game carries across large thematic and tonal shifts. almost nothing in echo feels like a convenient accident despite how wildly different some of the routes can be from one another, whereas night in the woods, to me, feels like a collage of a bunch of different ideas thrown together with little thought put into their cohesion.
for most people these issues are ignorable, for me they're not. had a hard time putting my finger on why exactly this game failed to resonate with me at all, but after i saw a game going for something kinda similar do it with flying colors, it's led me to thinking about it again. only real reason i wrote this is that i mostly just wanted to get my thoughts down about this game now that ive got a good grasp on them lol
===================
year and a half later edit (not really a proper review just organizing some thoughts i have about nitw and a similar game):
been thinking about this one a lot recently. not because i've really changed my opinion or love it now, but because it feels like such wasted potential. forgive me if this one is hard to read, my thoughts about this game are very tangled and laying them out in a way that makes sense is difficult
one of my favorite games of all time, echo (a free vn basically no one has played but i digress), has nearly all the same building blocks as night in the woods. you've got:
-vaguely a coming of age story
-about coming back to your rural dead-end hometown from college
-reuniting with your old friend group, hanging out & talking with them
-you get to choose who to hang out with & get different content based on who you pick
-a member of the friend group is gone, you progressively figure out what happened to them and why
-pretty gay and pretty "indie furry", in a way that deters a lot of the people not in the target demographic from ever trying it.
i could go on but i won't because that would land itself in spoiler territory for one or both, but if you've played both they should reveal themselves to be very similar in premise. there's enough differences to matter but my point is that they're 2 games that are so easy to compare to one another that one could do it with nothing but the first sentence of each game's product descriptions. so why do i love echo as much as i do, and not really care for nitw as much as i do? for me, the answer lies entirely within execution.
thought 1: i feel like the biggest sticking point for me is how nitw handles emotion, that being, it barely does. which for a game all about talking to people is pretty bad! often the most you'll get is a character narrowing or opening their eyes a bit more and dryly delivering an "oh my god" or a "no fucking way", but the character sprites barely emote, and there's no descriptive text that lets you fill in the details. echo at least has your standard neutral/happy/angry/etc visual novely sprites for each character, but where that game shines is in its text descriptions. the combination of these two does wonders for the believability of that game's world and its characters--it's really no wonder why so many games about talking to people opt for a visual novel format. contrast that to nitw, where every character talks like they're texting one another. people don't talk like this, they type like this, which is a very important distinction to be made, and i couldn't help but be pulled out of the experience any time i noticed it.
thought 2: night in the woods often emphasizes the fact that possum springs is a dead end town no one really wants to live in, but aside from the text there's really nothing backing it up. for a town as "shitty" as everyone thinks it is, it looks way too pleasant to exist within. night in the woods is simply too pretty for what it's going for. if you want to say that the game is actually about how this small town isn't actually that bad, might i point you to some plot beats that happen in the story that directly contradict that? contrast that to echo, which isnt nearly as wishy-washy about how it wants to present the town; it's oppressively hot, most of the houses are vacant or abandoned, everything is barren or messy or grimy or all of the above, the game goes the whole nine yards. the refuge from this is in the friendships the mc has formed, and when things go badly you can't just escape to "oh look at how pretty the game is", it's all laid bare in a way you can't ignore. night in the woods clearly wants to tug on your emotional strings, but it's missing any sort of bite, which leads me pretty cleanly to my next point...
thought 3: to me, night in the woods feels conflicted in what it wants to be. nitw is a cozy game where you hang out with your friends but it's also a game that delves into the troubles that can befall a freindship, particularly in bea's events (i will mention that i only played one or two of greggs when i played the game so i can't really comment on them). this is all good and fine, but the issue is that the game is too scared to let go of the "cozy" descriptor, so things happen that should have an effect on the dynamics of the friend group, but end up changing basically nothing. i'm not sure how much of a spoiler this is, but regardless of whether you choose to hang out with bea or gregg, the narrative converges towards the same point in the end as a plot starts to take center focus. this unintentionally kind of says that it doesn't really matter what you say to the people around you and if you never hang out with them, that they'll still be your friends, which feels... wrong? like that can't be what they're going for, right? mae is allowed to be at best a total klutz and at worst actively malicious towards the people around her and no one really minds all that much in the long run.
it all comes down to narrative goals; night in the woods tells the player "it's ok to be confused about life in your early 20s" but there's so many extraneous elements that this idea is often shoved to the wayside. once the plot gets going it's basically completely gone as a theme. contrast this with echo, which, to be vague as to not thematically spoil it, has an undercurrent of "trauma" that the game carries across large thematic and tonal shifts. almost nothing in echo feels like a convenient accident despite how wildly different some of the routes can be from one another, whereas night in the woods, to me, feels like a collage of a bunch of different ideas thrown together with little thought put into their cohesion.
for most people these issues are ignorable, for me they're not. had a hard time putting my finger on why exactly this game failed to resonate with me at all, but after i saw a game going for something kinda similar do it with flying colors, it's led me to thinking about it again. only real reason i wrote this is that i mostly just wanted to get my thoughts down about this game now that ive got a good grasp on them lol
did not get a headache ONCE. I'm just built different
a game that tries to tackle serious issues like child abuse while also simultaneously having several panty shots of someone who is canonically 15 years old
edit: rewatching a friend play this and while most of it is actually just boring, i can’t believe i forgot that there’s like a 10 minute span where they upskirt the 9 year old CSA victim like 3 different times as a joke. actual disaster of a video game
edit: rewatching a friend play this and while most of it is actually just boring, i can’t believe i forgot that there’s like a 10 minute span where they upskirt the 9 year old CSA victim like 3 different times as a joke. actual disaster of a video game
2023
This review contains spoilers
Eh.
Very impressive work technically and visually and auditorily (they have got to tell me who did the ambient songs for this i need to listen to their work because the stuff here is incredible) but it falls to the same exact issues Yume Nikki does. The atmosphere is impressive until you get stuck somewhere for 10 minutes and have to pull up a wiki page (that spoils everything if you move your eyes in the wrong direction) to figure out what obscure thing you have to do to trip the flag that lets you progress to the next part. (Also not huge on the "liminal space" aesthetic that's rampant here, I think it's executed about as well as it can be, but like, empty airports and such are still kind of played out i feel.)
Judging by how much people love Yume Nikki, I'm clearly in the minority opinion as far as my repulsion towards oblique progression goes (honestly, i can barely even get through an old point-and-click adventure game, i'm definitely the weird one), so I'm just gonna chock this one whiffing on me up to personal taste
Aside: while the game itself i can easily see someone appreciating a ton, the metatextual ARG/Creepypasta shit really sucks lol, imagine turning a seemingly earnest depiction of grief into some lame "the computer is haunted and its killing me what da hell" shit
Very impressive work technically and visually and auditorily (they have got to tell me who did the ambient songs for this i need to listen to their work because the stuff here is incredible) but it falls to the same exact issues Yume Nikki does. The atmosphere is impressive until you get stuck somewhere for 10 minutes and have to pull up a wiki page (that spoils everything if you move your eyes in the wrong direction) to figure out what obscure thing you have to do to trip the flag that lets you progress to the next part. (Also not huge on the "liminal space" aesthetic that's rampant here, I think it's executed about as well as it can be, but like, empty airports and such are still kind of played out i feel.)
Judging by how much people love Yume Nikki, I'm clearly in the minority opinion as far as my repulsion towards oblique progression goes (honestly, i can barely even get through an old point-and-click adventure game, i'm definitely the weird one), so I'm just gonna chock this one whiffing on me up to personal taste
Aside: while the game itself i can easily see someone appreciating a ton, the metatextual ARG/Creepypasta shit really sucks lol, imagine turning a seemingly earnest depiction of grief into some lame "the computer is haunted and its killing me what da hell" shit
lol. lmao.
I seem to be in the minority here but this actually really sucks lol. Stupidly self-indulgent and nostalgia-pandering, like Look At All This Cool Old Stuff!!! But all it really does is showcase how far Fortnite's come in the many years since Chapter 1.
The most obvious change is the approach to balancing:
1. Zero Build is given pretty much zero consideration, and items range from borderline useless in it (the Jetpack and lower level grenade launchers) to comically and insanely overpowered (the hoverboard + a shotgun + decent tracking skills is hilariously broken and allows you to third party basically any fight with almost no effort). The map is also deeply unsuited for it, with tons of sheer cliffs and environments that would be trivial with building but stupid and frustrating without it. Also it's empty as fuck, there are a stupid amount of empty fields here even with the myriad of locations from different seasons of Chapter 1.
(addendum: I am not playing build mode. People have had too many years to get good at it and I'm not interested in going up against someone who's spent thousands of hours training it. During the chapter this season's trying to imitate, people weren't quite as cracked yet and you could get by fine if you could build a quick 1x1, but that's definitely no longer the case. And I just can't really be arsed to put so much time into getting good at something so specific to just one video game)
2. You're expected to play so much more conservatively. Which is usually just boring. Who ever thought "bringing back Fortnite to when it was trying to ape PUBG the hardest" was a good idea? No one talks about PUBG anymore, and for good reason--it was overlong, boring, and fights ended way too quickly. Bringing Fortnite right back to this by limiting movement options and making healing take so much longer than it has for years, just to indulge the nostalgia-blind teenagers playing this game who played the early seasons as pre-teens is lame, and the shorter season length makes me think they knew it sucked as well.
Anyways, in all honesty I am glad this is only half the length of a normal season! Fortnite's biggest strength has been its frequent updates and constantly shifting meta, which makes a season like this, where they just Play The Hits with no understanding that the hits were in a pretty much entirely different game, feel really odd. Hope they never do this again!
I seem to be in the minority here but this actually really sucks lol. Stupidly self-indulgent and nostalgia-pandering, like Look At All This Cool Old Stuff!!! But all it really does is showcase how far Fortnite's come in the many years since Chapter 1.
The most obvious change is the approach to balancing:
1. Zero Build is given pretty much zero consideration, and items range from borderline useless in it (the Jetpack and lower level grenade launchers) to comically and insanely overpowered (the hoverboard + a shotgun + decent tracking skills is hilariously broken and allows you to third party basically any fight with almost no effort). The map is also deeply unsuited for it, with tons of sheer cliffs and environments that would be trivial with building but stupid and frustrating without it. Also it's empty as fuck, there are a stupid amount of empty fields here even with the myriad of locations from different seasons of Chapter 1.
(addendum: I am not playing build mode. People have had too many years to get good at it and I'm not interested in going up against someone who's spent thousands of hours training it. During the chapter this season's trying to imitate, people weren't quite as cracked yet and you could get by fine if you could build a quick 1x1, but that's definitely no longer the case. And I just can't really be arsed to put so much time into getting good at something so specific to just one video game)
2. You're expected to play so much more conservatively. Which is usually just boring. Who ever thought "bringing back Fortnite to when it was trying to ape PUBG the hardest" was a good idea? No one talks about PUBG anymore, and for good reason--it was overlong, boring, and fights ended way too quickly. Bringing Fortnite right back to this by limiting movement options and making healing take so much longer than it has for years, just to indulge the nostalgia-blind teenagers playing this game who played the early seasons as pre-teens is lame, and the shorter season length makes me think they knew it sucked as well.
Anyways, in all honesty I am glad this is only half the length of a normal season! Fortnite's biggest strength has been its frequent updates and constantly shifting meta, which makes a season like this, where they just Play The Hits with no understanding that the hits were in a pretty much entirely different game, feel really odd. Hope they never do this again!