i don't like the witchy aesthetic. i think overly mystifying women's shared connections and secret powers leads you precisely to the kind of world this game paints: untethered from reality, out of space, out of time.

i'd prefer not to make this point too strongly, but why would nonhuman extraterrestrials or prehuman ancient beings have the category "woman" or a relationship to it? i really do think that to make a story within this aesthetic interesting, you have to come into it with an understanding and critique of the milieu's constitutive gender essentialism that this game sadly just isn't armed with.

i know how hard it is to believe i might be offering these kinds of criticisms in good faith in 2024, when red strings club, the previous game from this studio, caught some unbelievably hypocritical pseudofeminist crap when it came out, and a similar type of aggressive, vapid moralizing is now a more popular strategy than ever for bringing queer and gender nonconforming artists down a peg. i do just genuinely believe it's disrespectful not to fully critically engage with a text just because some other people do it in a dishonest way.

you ever think about all these nasu mage kids inhabiting huge, intimidating, foreign-style mansions in which they carve out a precarious, temporary, probably doomed, and yet precious daily life, always threatened by some inhuman force of lineage and tradition?

you ever think about the experience of trying to inhabit a way of life or a culture different from the one you are expected to have? you ever feel out of place? you ever tell lies to protect other people's feelings? your own?

of course not. me neither.

some type of demon possessed me to try and get decent at starcraft 2 in the year 2023 and in the process of doing so, i was really struck by how good this game's UI is. everything makes sense, every hotkey is rebindable, units control in an intuitive and satisfying way, it gives you all the information and feedback you need and nothing more. i was never a huge rts player, but this is really making me remember what the appeal was.

unfortunately the campaigns are just depressing otherwise, because it's impossible to stop seeing the wh40k origins of every element of the world, except completely deprived of all bite and humour, and reduced to action movie slop about space americans doing regime change and also ancient aliens. in other words, it's a blizzard game.

foolishly, i put this in turn based mode and had an okay amount of fun until i got to a defense mission where 20ish "allied" npcs take their useless moves one by one while enemy reinforcements spawn every turn. the fight took something like 32 turns and i uninstalled the game immediately afterwards.

honestly, i would have powered through even a little bit more than that, because there's something satisfying to me about pathfinder's ridiculous character building system, but the writing was the nail in the coffin: verbose, unengaging, boilerplate fantasy about angels vs demons, delivered in a combination of font and text box that made my eyes tire really quickly for some reason.

i'm sure there's a fun game in here if you're willing to look for it. not for me though.

lots of games these days look great, but this one is a huge example of the difference between "good graphics" and the beauty resulting from a deliberate aesthetic effort, style and vision.

also, if you were ever wondering how pentiment could be improved upon, right here is your answer: make it more gay and anime.

i can't in good conscience give it 5 stars because i had close to zero fun with any of the actual dexterity based gameplay and i think it's just no good. but i love the game anyway. what a treasure.

it starts off really slow and i made sure to give it time to hook me -- introduce a character that i'll go crazy about, show me a mechanics complication that i'll be excited to exploit, set up a plot thread that looks promising -- but it just refused to do any of that. i gave it enough time, even, to do what fft does in its first act -- throw us into the confusing tutorial mission in medias res to create the impression of a whirlwind of political violence and uncertain allegiances, and then flash back to introduce the historical background, ramza's relationship with his brothers, delita's difficult place in the family, all the stuff about the corpse brigade or whatever those guys were called. triangle strategy used that time to drag its feet and belabour the most obvious "everything changed when the fire nation attacked" setup in history.

i really tried to like it. i wanted to see what it was going to do with its branching narrative stuff and all the scheming nobles it was so slowly introducing. but i just don't have enough fft nostalgia in my body to carry me through what's otherwise an alright but thoroughly unexciting game.