"Beneath a patch of grass, her
Bones the old Dutch master hid
While elsewhere Tobias
And the angel disguise
What the scholars surmise was a mother and kid

Interred with other daughters
In dirt in other potter's fields
Above them, parades
Mark the passing of days
Through parks where pale colonnades arch in marble and steel
Where all of the twenty-thousand attending your footfall
And the cause that they died for are lost in the idling bird calls
And the records they left are cryptic at best
Lost in obsolescence
The text will not yield, nor x-ray reveal
With any fluorescence
Where the hand of the master begins and ends"

I was extremely excited to see this released unceremoniously, free of hype or expectation weighing down ankles to pitfalls of modern game discourse. Given the simplicity of West of Loathing's design, I thought that a genre switch with more of the same seasoning and core ingredients as before would be enough to carry this 'sequel', but unfortunately either the recipe worked despite itself with WoL or the team has lost their sense of taste. Nothing that worked in the first game really works here: the combat is fiddlier with less player expression, forcing builds to be simpler while also demanding more bland item use to simulate 'breadth' of combat; the writing is less cohesive around the Lovecraftian setting, causing both the sincere characterisation of its cast to be weakened (with nary a useful or interesting team member in sight) and the humour to hit weaker because its broadness accentuates less the setting or expectations of genre; the world design feels less like exploration is rewarded (which it wasn't really in WoL either, but the larger map evinced a world to be explored whereas SoL has hubs which must be Mass Effected through for story drips: a pain) and more like you're linearly being pushed from one non-cohesive beat to the next; the puzzle design, which was at times almost a joke itself in how difficult it was in WoL, is simplified to mush here - nothing is rewarding and every time I had to rub my two brain cells together for a fetch quest, it felt like a chore.

I wanted to love it, and I'll definitely be wary to see if WoL is worse in estimation after this has to be considered as where that game goes in hindsight, but the product is so bleh.

PayPal: You received $100,000 from The Bonfire Captain
The Bonfire Captain: He won't treat you like i do baby
The Bonfire Captain: baby please don't text The Devil back
The Bonfire Captain: Missed Calls (500)
The Devil: daddy long dick just landed baby, what's up

its called pastiche you dipshits and it rocks

honestly this game is basically perfect, surf maps sega dreamcast sonic adventure gun game good sound design good platforming good leaderboards good skips good everything. adore it!

also here's my spiciest take: if you dont like the writing in this but you do like the writing in hades then you need to get better at having fun because they are The Same, but this one is more joyous

“They’re just lines of code.” That’s what my friend tells me. I wasn’t allowed to play Halo. It was too violent, and my parents, either in spite of or because of their relative progressiveness, did not want to allow or encourage me in playing violent video games. I remember googling about Red vs. Blue and my dad informed me that I “shouldn’t be looking at that.” I was a kid, after all, not even in my teens at the time. It’s not like I wasn’t able to get my hands on violent games; my crusade to play violent games, though, is a story for another time. The point is that our house never had Halo in it. And when, on that rare occasion, I did get to play Halo at a friend’s house, I was very careful not to tell my parents. So, in my mid-teens, I was at my friend’s house, in their thoroughly air-conditioned basement, with the lights off, and we played some Halo. I’m sitting close to the screen in an awkward chair. I’m awful at this game; I only know how to play these games on a mouse and keyboard. I see a grunt, fleeing with its arms in the air, and say, “Poor guy.” That’s when my friend chuckles and says, “They’re just lines of code.”

Interactive Buddy was a mainstay for any kid looking for ways to goof off in computer labs. This is what you see: four gray walls, a gray background, and a chubby little figure made six gray balls. That’s the buddy. You use your mouse to nudge and move the buddy around, generating a small amount of money. You use that money to buy new tools and what not: bowling balls, fire hoses, Molotov cocktails. And in doing things with the buddy, you can acquire more money to buy more weapons and tools. You can choose to play with the buddy and be kind, and you can choose to torment the buddy and be cruel. Cruelty usually wins.

This is how Interactive Buddy is remembered: a torture chamber. The buddy seems to be modeled after other programs like Bonzi Buddy or other digital pets. Its UI conjures up images of Windows XP. But while a virtual pet usually exists to be cared for, the buddy has no needs. You can’t feed it, and it doesn’t want food. So what is the buddy’s reason for being? The game has an opinion. The buddy exists to be hurt. The game description instructs you to beat it up. It’s more like a Bobo doll than a pet. I would venture to say that the vast majority of players used the game as a sadistic time-waste and little more.

The internet in the 2000s was rife with violent Flash diversions. Madness, Whack Your Boss, Happy Wheels, these jubilees of juvenile hyperviolence were everywhere. Interactive Buddy came out during that time, and it shows. For one, the game is filled dated and niche reference humor (how do you even explain StrawberryClock?), but it also has a fascination with violence. This was in the wake of things like Jack Thompson’s lawsuits, after Columbine and September 11th, where the notion of violent video games still felt a little transgressive. The developer of Interactive Buddy is literally called Shock Value. It revels in violence intentionally. And hey, why not? It wasn't hurting anybody, after all. They’re just lines of code. But our attitudes (or at least mine) have shifted dramatically over the years.

I’ve seen others comment that they feel guilt for what they did to the buddy, that it was cruel to harm the buddy. And truly, the buddy did nothing to deserve this, right? It merely exists, a floating jumble of orbs, and we come in and brutalize and beat it. The buddy expresses fear and dislike for the explosions and drubbings it’s put through. It doesn’t like “boom!”, and it’s mood gauge will slowly become a frown. It is clear that the poor thing is suffering. That would make it cruel to abuse it this way.

So that’s the obvious corrected position, right? That hurting the interactive buddy is bad, and you shouldn’t do it? Well, I’m not quite convinced of that, either.

See, to adopt that position is to take up a pretty serious assumption: that a simulated action correlates directly to a real one. We suppose that the buddy is harmed, but the buddy cannot experience pain. It’s a digital object. It’s just lines of code.

It is false to say the buddy dislikes pain. The buddy doesn’t like or dislike anything. The buddy is not an animal. It has no desires. It has no consciousness or qualia. It doesn’t breathe or even bleed. It is a simulated object with simulated movements that imitate that of fear, pain, and joy. When the buddy recoils from an explosive or shakes as it is tickled, these are only animations, programmed and procedural gestures that bear a likeness to animal behavior. As far as we can tell, there is no real suffering occurring. There is no evidence of a computer having consciousness, probably won’t ever be for a while, and certainly not the buddy. Even a Kantian would struggle to find an argument against it; after all, the buddy has no rationality to which we are to hold ourselves to respecting.

There is therefore no harm in hurting the buddy, nor is there a duty to be kind to it. All there is is a symbolic charade of a hedonistic dichotomy. The simulacra of pain and pleasure, entangled with each other as a binary pair. It is an imitation. It’s just lines of code. It is in fact less than an imitation of pain, not of the sensation, but only an abstract impersonation of the response to pain, the superficial choreography. A simulacra, of Baudrillard’s third or fourth stage, which signifies either absence or deference to other signs. And to accept the simulacra of pain and pleasure as equivalent to their corollaries in reality is to accept simulation as reality. At what point does the magic circle give way to our realized actions, then?

It should not be said that causing pain in Interactive Buddy is in some capacity related to causing harm outside of it, then. As such with pleasure, too. To do so is to open the floodgates; any digital harm must be condemned. Is it ethical to shoot aliens in Halo? Is it ethical to kick turtle shells in Mario? Is it ethical to eat ghosts in Pac-Man? Is there any virtual action in most video games that does not carry profound guilt? This is the necessary extent of this argument.

So, that’s my conclusion then, right? That it’s okay to hurt the buddy, and you should feel free to remorselessly bully and mutilate any digital denizens you encounter, because they’re just lines of code? Not quite. That doesn’t really work for me either.

Even if they are just lines of code, these are lines of code that have been given faces. Scott McCloud created this pyramid of representation: the realistic, the abstract, and the iconographic its three corners. You might be able to argue against this model, but let’s adopt it for now. The buddy is abstract and iconographic. Again, by default, it’s six orbs floating in a blank room. But the absence of realistic features does not mean it is no longer representative and recognizable. Its orientation and movements imbue these orbs with a humanity. While the buddy is so iconographic to be merely six floating balls, it is still immediately clear to most that it is a chubby little humanoid. You can call it pareidolia if you want, I guess, but that’s lying by omission. Pareidolia is the recognition of a sign (usually faces) in nebulous stimuli. These video game characters, on the other hand, were sculpted with the intent to invoke this response. We recognize a level of humanity in them, and that’s why we have empathy for them. This is what Jesper Juul might call the game’s fiction. The fiction of a game contextualizes its action and engagement. Without it, they really are just lines of code; floating points and vectors in a fog. But the fiction condenses the mist into a concrete, intelligible, and recognizable form.

When I saw the grunts fleeing in Halo, I did not see an array of code and polygons. I saw a creature fleeing in fear. My mirror neurons responded. And so my body and my mind instinctually, if only a bit, felt sympathy for it. It may be a computer generation, but I am able to recognize the simulacrum of a soul. Once again, it is important to know that these are only representations, but how we respond to representations still could mean something. We engage with signifiers in a simulated world. Does how we engage with them signify something, too?

There is not much evidence as far as I’m aware of that being exposed to violent media makes you more violent, nor that enacting violence within a digital space does, either. But the effect of media on our behaviors is something that has bothered people for years and years. Rap music, hard rock, comic books, television, even theater are all of a family of reviled media. Well before Mortal Kombat’s moral panic and Jack Thompson, Plato expressed the opposite skepticism about drama and poetry as mimesis, as imitation. Aristotle agreed that poetry was founded on imitation, but considered the disjunct between art and life to be a strength, too, and not just a weakness. And is it not, on some level? Despite the moral outrage, violent video games have not heralded a sharp rise in violence in the world. Anecdotes, maybe. Heightened aggression, possible. There is no real empirical evidence that I know of that shows violent art encourages violent behavior. So what unnerves us still?

With his name still in our mouths, let’s refer to Aristotle again with virtue ethics. Virtue ethics frame ethics as a product of one’s character. This may be the key to unlocking the modern controversy of violent video games: the virtue of simulated violence. Harming the buddy may not produce any real negative consequences per se, but the fear is that it produces or is produced by a vicious player.

The question is then not a matter of ethical utility, but of motive and virtue. It is quite literally a question about virtual reality.

What is it that purpose of harming the buddy? What is its virtue, its vice, its extension? Even outside the confines of Interactive Buddy’s torture engine, there is no shortage of cruel ballet in digital worlds. The subjects are not harmed, and as far as can be told, it doesn’t seem to have any broader implications for the ethics of the player. It affects nothing. All we see is mimicked anguish. There is nothing, good or bad, that comes of it. So why do we do it? Why do we want to see depictions of violence at all, let alone participate in them?

The cliche answer is that there is some immutable darkness within humanity which feeds on suffering. This is the kind of answer you’d hear from a Jordan B. Peterson or whatever Freudian charlatan. I’m not sure whether to call this most significantly naïve or presumptuous. I suppose it is both. It is presumptuous because it assumes this aesthetic tendency is universal, something that we all experience. It isn’t, and there are plenty of people who do not enjoy violent art. It is naïve because it implicitly posits that this correlates to a desire to enact the imagined actions and not merely fantasize about them, just as discussed. That the simulated darkness is in direct relation to a real darkness. So what does that mean? What makes a simulated darkness?

They are fantasies, but why do we strive to blur the line between this fantasy and reality? There has been a race towards the most realistic blood and guts we can find. Even if we want and need the magic circle as a boundary between reality and game to enable our violent impulses, there is also a culture of delight in hyper-realistic blood pouring out of our screens. We may have grown bored of it, sure, but the remnants are there. An example? Interactive Buddy gives you an option. For a price, you can make the buddy bleed. It changes nothing other than flecks of red appearing on the screen. So do you choose to? Do you choose to make the buddy’s pain feel more real to you? Do you make the fantasy more real? Why?

There’s an example from Slavoj Žižek (I’m sure you can find it somewhere, I’m not sure if it’s been written down) where he offers an interesting inversion. He presents the cliche of a gamer who in real life is meek, milquetoast, and bland man, but within the world of a game, he is brash, a womanizer, a marauder. The typical interpretation is that the real life person is the real person who lives out a fantasy in the game, but Žižek asks: what if it is the meek version of him is the one where he is pretending, and in the game he is truly himself?

It’s an interesting twist on the thought. It’s undeniable that virtual spaces offer ranges of expression which we desire in the real world but can only access there. This is one of games’ many powers: not just a lusory attitude, but an attitude of realization is possible. The boundary between game and reality is what enables this, that allow us to inhabit new and foreign attitudes of any kind. This extends to violence. The initial deconstruction Žižek offers asks us to consider that the truer nature is one of cruelty that is merely suppressed by the context of society. But games are games, and their disjunction from reality is freeing because it is a disjunction. It is precisely the division between game and reality that allows the average person to engage with this sadistic charade. Should the digital world become reality, how many players would actually continue the abuse? Would they become a marauder? Would you? I doubt it.

You might at first compare it to the way an actor speaks and moves as a character, but does not become them. Like Plato and Aristotle before him, J. L. Austin recognized that the act of speech was transformed by the stage. Austin wrote on the concept of speech act, things we can say that perform actions in and of themself, and highlights this. While the actor’s monologue is quite literally a performative utterance in one sense, it is not in the sense Austin uses that term. The speech does not, and cannot, perform an action it could otherwise; it is not intended to be taken in the same way as when the actor is off the stage. This is sometimes called the etiolation of language. It blanches the language; it is understood to not have the same seriousness behind it. This notion has been properly interrogated by jolly old Derrida, who in turn was interrogated by Searle -- that whole scuffle. Regardless, it is essentially of intention, of what action is intended or unintended by the use of language. A similar thing happens in games. The lusory attitude we adopt not only changes the actions we perform, but also changes how they are received and understood. But we don’t just speak or write in games. In fact, we mostly make movements and perform actions. What is etiolated, then? A gesture.

The question of how one engages with Interactive Buddy is a question of gesture. What is the extension of these actions, and their meaning?

When philosopher of communication Vilem Flusser sets out to define “gesture”, he begins describing a scenario in which he is punched. He initially defines a gesture as “a movement of the body or of a tool attached with the body, for which there is no satisfactory causal explanation.” What Flusser means by causal is specific. His project is to establish foundations for a study of gesture’s meaning, elaborated to a wide range of sociological phenomena. The causes of a movement that are physiological or even psychological are not satisfactory for a gesture. The gesture has a component of meaning which Flusser does not view as fulfilled by those explanations. He then goes on describe being punched, and his arm recoiling in pain. This motion is one he declares a gesture, because it is representation of something: “My movement depicts pain. The movement is a symbol, and pain is its meaning.” This is seen in the buddy, but only as a simulation.

Let’s return to McCloud’s pyramid. While this system identifies images, it does not identify the images in motion. What of images’ gestures? Animation, too, could be put along such a pyramid. The motion of this buddy is what lends its verisimilitude. Lines of code parodying behavior. The buddy’s movements have an adequate causal explanation in the game itself, but when we extend this question to the programmer, it becomes a gesture. This is the intent of the designer: to communicate the concept of intention and interiority. We may recognize the buddy as just lines of code, but we still recognize the buddy’s behavior. Their gestures, while mere imitations, are recognizable as those of pain and of pleasure. But when we play Interactive Buddy, are these communicative gestures? When we express through the game, express through actions on the buddy? The buddy may communicate to us; maybe it’s more accurate to say that the designer communicates through the buddy. The buddy is a puppet of the code, the meanings expressed therein designed by a programmer. But in our engagement with the buddy, as we poke and prod at it, is this communication? If so, to what are we communicating?

Play may not necessarily be communicative, but when we make the choice to interpret it as such, and as gesture, we butt up against an issue. Communication, generally, implies at least two people. A person who transmits, and a person who receives. Communication theory also recognizes the store of information, such as in a diary, as a form of communication, as well, as it communicates from the past self to the future self. But in a game like Interactive Buddy, the movements we make ephemeral. They cannot be saved and cannot be retrieved. Like speech, it is uniterable and impermanent, eddying away in the wind. If a movement is neither made for communicate, nor capable of being retrieved, is it still a gesture, or just a random convulsion? Can a gesture be non-communicative? Or, is it possible that in this gesturing--or speaking for that matter, anything ephemeral and solitary--that the action itself is communicative to my own immediate experience? Do I gesture to myself, then? Is that what it means to entertain yourself? When we play a game on our own, are we gesturing to communicate with ourselves? What am I trying to say to myself then?

Consider a diary. When I write in a diary, I communicate to myself through written language. When I doodle in that same diary, I communicate to myself through images. The constraint of the medium informs what I communicate to myself. In some ways, the constraints are what create the possibility for immediate this self-communication to exist at all. When I open up Interactive Buddy, I communicate to myself through my gestures within the game. The buddy is just lines of code, but my way of interfacing with it is also made up of code, too. The tool of gesture is not just the mouse, not just the computer, but also the buddy itself. Flusser later defines “gesture” as a movement which expresses freedom (and even later, paired with the freedom to conceal or reveal). The cause of the gesture is the desire to make it and the freedom to do so. But any movement is going to be constrained in some capacity, the gesture by the body, the diary by the letter, the soliloquy by the spoken word. My freedom of communication is necessarily, to some degree, interpellated by its medium. In a game, this is the entire conceit of play. The constraints are what make this self-communication possible. The game's unique limits then directly inform what I am capable of communicating to myself through it. I am only allowed to express what the game allows me to express. My gestures are limited.

When we say that the buddy didn’t do anything to deserve this pain, what do we mean by that? The buddy does do something to deserve it: it exists. Let me explain. Video games are full of teleological universes. In most games, everything is instrumental. The platform exists to be jumped on, the enemy exists to be killed, the coin exists to be collected. Everything has a purpose. It is incredibly difficult to make a truly nihilistic game in a mechanical sense, because to do so is to weave between any instrumentality. It’s possible to tell a story about nihilism, or that lacks meaning, but its mechanics will have bespoke purposes. The universe of the game has a rhyme and a reason.

The world of Interactive Buddy is constructed for violence. Not in an architectural sense, but in a cosmological one. When Jacob Geller describes worlds designed for violence, he is describing the architecture of digital spaces, how they create affordances for violence, what they look like in the real world. The archicecture of Interactive Buddy is never more complex than four grey walls. Instead, the make-up of its reality is designed for violence. That is the destiny of its teleological universe. The buddy, of course, has no free will (and thus cannot truly gesture in the sense Flusser uses), for one. But the buddy also has a destiny. The buddy has an infinite capacity for suffering and cannot die. It’s lines of code that respond to what we do. By hurting the buddy, we gain more money with which to buy weapons to hurt the buddy. Its suffering is a tool of its own propagation. Even pleasure can be instrumentalized in making the buddy hurt. That is the monad of Interactive Buddy’s world: pain.

It is not only reasonable, but entirely predictable that players would abuse the buddy. When we begin to play Interactive Buddy, we enter a playground designed for the express purpose of violent gestures.

But did it have to be this way? Immediately, there is an ambiguity: the open hand. That’s what is equipped to your mouse at the start. What does an open hand do? It can touch and hold, and it can strike. In the closing of a hand, one can either grasp or form a fist. The open hand is a pharmakon, an undecided gesture, which the player disambiguates in their choice of what to do with it.

We will always be left with more questions than answers. By what virtue do we harm the buddy? Since it is not a true act of harm, what is the extension of the act that it is gesturing towards? What is the precise purpose of this gesture? What does it signify, and to whom?

Games create virtual realities. In them, we inhabit virtual bodies and disembodied forces. We inevitably make gestures with them. It is not merely the etiolation of gesture. The machine is made not just a tool of gesture, but the system of parameters that limits our gestures, too. Its confines yet also create, as a segmented reality, the possibility of new and alien behaviors and expressions. Their unreality is what defines them. They are virtual in every sense of the word. They are not just gestures, but gestures towards.

Whether or not to hurt the buddy is not really a question of ethics at the end of the day. The suffering of the buddy was a foregone conclusion. It was borne into a world that was made for torture. But that’s okay. Because it can’t be hurt, not for real. There’s no harm in it. They’re just lines of code. But why do we do it, anyway? What drives us to these fantasies? I don’t know, and I’m not sure I ever will truly understand the impulse. All I know for sure is the question we ask ourselves: do you choose to hurt the buddy? And why? It's not a question about ethics. It’s a question about virtual realities. It’s a question of what the gesture of the open hand means to you.

https://link.medium.com/rYQbDiTDjrb

i don't really wanna put a rating on a thing like this, though i kinda wish i could put a <3 on it the way you can with letterboxd. but anyway. this hits very close to home.

i moved back to my original hometown in michigan after living in portland, oregon for about 13 years... at the end of 2019. at the end of a relationship which had lasted for nearly 10 of those years. i stayed with family briefly and then moved into a smallish 1-bedroom apartment that i hate (with my cat, kismet, who i brought home with me because i couldn't stand to leave her (and i wish i could've brought more of my cats with me)).

one big difference (between myself and this game's creator, according to the game itself) is that my mental illness gets in the way of me keeping jobs and i've been unemployed for most of the time since. i'm currently receiving assistance through september, and i need to have some sort of income before then. i also want to move. living alone is killing me.

honestly, i don't even know if i'd still be here without the small irc channel occupied by longtime friends providing me with some sort of anchor. i do wish i could hear people's voices more often, though. one of the things i miss most about living with my ex (and, for a time, a roommate) is that constant source of company. i just need to be near people, even when we're all tending to ourselves, in our own space (within the same space).

my desk is positioned right in front of one of my 2 windows and i have a decent view of trees and sky, but the loneliness is inescapable. i don't live downtown, either, so i rarely feel like going outside unless i have a place to go - otherwise the aimlessness of "going out for a walk" just makes me feel even lonelier.

my cat cries a lot and i think she's lonely and bored. i feel awful about it. i would like to get another cat, but i'm too poor and i pretty much only spend my money, whenever i do have it, on video games and weed. sometimes booze.

writing this isn't actually making me feel any better.

damn it

it's hard for me to write a review about this game. i feel like it was designed in a lab to be optimally enjoyable for exactly me, much like how McDonald's french fries are chemically engineered to be Mathematically and Provably Delicious for the general American public.

i can't talk about Neon White without talking about Arcane Kids. in the mid-10s, being someone who staked a lot of identity into playing games was profoundly embarassing. ignoring the truly heinous shit that goes without saying, year after year, AAA studios continued to pump out "mids at best." on the other side of things, "indie" games were no longer new and were in something of an awkward puberty. i can't tell you how many "physics-based puzzle platformers with a gimmick" i had pitched to me that promised to be Actually Good. they weren't. however, during this time, the Unity weirdos were churning away in their art scenes around the globe. the new derisive joke became "make a game in unity, make a million dollars." of course, the people making these jokes didn't know what they were talking about, but i guess none of us really did back then.

---

Arcane Kids existed as something of an antithesis to the games of the time. when we had more than enough pixel-art RPGs, they gave us ZINETH. when we got innundated with walking simulators, they gave us Bubsy 3D: Bubsy Visits the James Turrell Retrospective. when indies decided to try and be funny with things like Goat Simulator, we got Sonic Dreams Collection, CRAP! No One Loves Me, and this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RNCyc3hzAw). while a lot of these games were "funny" or "jokes," they always had deeper ideas to them beneath the surface around player agency, the joy of moving your avatar, the love of Videogames As Videogames.

i cannot possibly explain how strange it felt to turn on the game and have the title screen after the intro cutscene splash in with a voice echoing "NEON WHITE" as the moodiest witch house track creeps in through your headphones. the fake scanlines, the neon glow on the characters, the tone, the vibes. i thought to myself, "they finally did it." as i played more, i confirmed my suspicions.

Arcane Kids finally made the game it feels like they had been working toward all these years. blazing fast, huge jumps, easy-to-learn-but-hard-to-master, tight, violent, horny, loud, freaky, all at once. in Mission 11, as breakneck-paced breakcore blasted out of my screen, i screamed aloud in my room to my partner who was watching me play "I. FUCKING. LOVE. THIS. GAME." in time with each click of the RMB that shot me across the map at incredible speeds. in moments like this, you know for a fact that moments like Bubsy pulling out an uzi and a katana at the end of Bubsy 3D or them subjecting a crowd of people at a game conference to vape trick videos that inspired their previous game (https://youtu.be/2pO23GTaBtk?si=ldB9w6CU2UC3TkHI&t=1791) was not just them contributing to the general irony-poisoned sense of humor of the time; they legitimately thought that it was tight as fuck.

-----

one line from the infamous Arcane Kids Manifesto (https://arcanekids.com/manifesto) that i always think about is "the purpose of gameplay is to hide secrets."

at a time when even FromSoft has started to move away from their smaller, more-focused world design in favor of chasing the lucrative open-world design potential in Elden Ring, it feels amazing that we have a game like Neon White that is about intricately crafted and infinitely replayable level design. after years of waiting, we finally have the one true Indie Puzzle Platformer, but this time it has guns.

the gameplay (for me, usually) fell into a flowchart like this:
-beat a level once and get whatever medal you get
-go back to find the secret gift
-during this second trip, notice which parts of the levels you can skip or save time on that were hidden to you before
-play the level a 3rd time to get a gold medal
-use the hint from the Gold medal to get an Ace medal on your 4th time
-over time, you begin to amass a collection of "hey, did you know this quirk" movement secrets like shooting bullets, bunny hopping after a dash, or sliding with the shotgun's discard

game design that calls attention to itself like this is beautiful. level designers are artists. we've known this since Doom WADs. however, in the time since Doom we've had several games like Gears of War, Halo, and their ilk that said "wasn't the sickest part about Doom being a huge buff guy with loud guns just blasting disgusting freaks and seeing them explode???" while that does indeed whip, Neon White is on the other side of the coin saying "wasn't the best part about Doom the level design and the joy of figuring out how to move as fast as you can through a level???"

after 11 years of watching speedrunning streams nearly every day, Neon White finally made me feel like maybe i could do it too. first you pit yourself against the Ace medal time, then your friends, then the Dev Times, then your own ghost, and then the world. to this day, i have yet to have a global #1, but i've had a #2 and two #3s. i'll keep going though.

[EDIT 7/17/23: i did it :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWT2b9pwRMI]

---

Neon White is a love letter in videogame form

It's a testament to how much I like Citizen Sleeper that I'm giving it four stars despite having the absolute worst copy-editing I've ever seen in a professionally-released video game. It is strewn with typos, spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and a thoroughgoing lack of understanding of the typographical conventions of written English. It is embarrassing, particularly in a game whose focal point is its writing.

All that said... it's still a good game. It walks in the footsteps of similar "modular narrative" games like 80 Days and Sunless Skies in using a light resource-management system to drive the player to allocate their time between many different bite-sized threads of plot, creating an individual route through the game's story. This is one of my absolute favorite microgenres but a difficult one to get right, and I'm thrilled with any game that can pull it off competently.

Citizen Sleeper isn't as successful at this as its forebears, though. By the end of the game you have enough resources to do almost everything the game has on offer, and there turn out to be minimal ways that plots can differ from playthrough to playthrough. Starting a new save feels more onerous than exciting, knowing that so much of it will be clicking through the same dialog rather than forging new paths.

I often finish modular narrative games with a sense that the system on which its built still has untapped potential. The calculus of quests taking inputs and producing outputs while clocks tick down cycle after cycle is simple but expressive—it could give rise to such an intricate web of interlocking threads. Is it too much to hope for that, with the groundwork now laid down, another game could be created on top of it... this time with an editing pass?