An adventure mystery game with a healthy breadth of verbs boiled down from a text command released for early home PCs. Portopia, in its verbage and roundabout area connections, come together to articulate how miserable casing people and points of interest as a beat cop would feel like. The short form writing of the era effortlessly conveys the NPCs' insistent lack of cooperation while the few images of the game still call upon the cinematic in their simplicity. The point is friction. The game is not poorly composed, it is a singular jigsaw puzzle with a very specific solution, completely indifferent to your victory. The maze is odd, but obviously serves to express a great final challenge in an otherwise sparse system and isn't very hard if you just bust out pen and paper (or just check the guide because we live in the future and you can do what you want). I'd also say the obtuseness of the pixel hunting is incredibly overstated if you spend at least a couple of minutes (in an extremely short game) poking at the obvious locations. The nature of finding truth is all trial and error, so persevere.

CWs for Pokemon Violet: parent-child abandonment, bullying

Mine and many others return to the franchise, Violet has been in the cards since the jump to 3D. All games funneling towards the open world service model is definitely signs of a global decay state, but this one is pretty fine! 3D finally makes sense for Gamefreak with sectioned regions mostly organized by well disguised and only slightly branching paths. The strange theme park tracks we've been subjected to since XY are no more and instead there's just many organic Pokemon routes slapped together. The regional dex being 400 entries isn't really my taste and it can feel messy at times because the choice of sequence, but this is both a tight return to Pokemon as a road trip as well as a freeform open world adventure.

CWs for Citizen Sleeper: body horror, gun violence, graphic descriptions of wounds

Citizen Sleeper is a tender stab at post-humanist sci-fi that has a difficult time figuring out what I thinks of the individual in the tides of society. The economy of social sim and CRPG resources produces exciting and stressful conditions of a day laborer on the lamb, but the writing and narrative expression choices think extremely contradictory individualist things. I adore the approach to prose, the illustration, and the biggest swings on most of the quest, but it's just real fucking weird when everything leads to strange video game final boss scenarios when you're otherwise supposed to be a decaying husk looking for connection and purpose.

The spread of choices with the cast becomes narrow and slight as each quest line comes to a close and in general the game as a system falls apart once you have a bit of money to move around. I think this is a beautiful game that land tone, scale, and affection with an really impressive economy even if it has a confused and sometimes even contradictory thesis.

CWs for Kaimaitachi no Yoru: Rinne Saisei: extreme graphic gore, graphic description of wounds

A foundational Sound Novel that's absolutely electric when tumbling you towards the main bad end, but kind of inert when time comes to wrap everything up. It's easy to see the ways that ryu07 and Uchikoshi looked to this game in the way shit breaks bad so suddenly and magnificently. It's really some of the best gruesome "And Then There Were None" type shit I've ever read crammed into a very succinct Novel Game.

The game never leaves the realm of pulp fiction, which leads to a weak resolution. The killer is given away by an easy to stumble into and very early bad end, and then this port let's you fumble through assembling the logic via the flowchart with more forgiveness than feels purposeful in an otherwise gruesome affair.

There's no big statement here which is both the game's weakness and strength. It's hard to strike the balance of being this exciting while being technically and intellectually conventional. Fun to grab and poke at for a few nights and forget when you're over it. Also always a great time reading ryu07 somewhat outside his wheelhouse.

CNs for Space Funeral: graphic wounds, gore, child abuse, body horror, sui*

An intoxicating and mysterious RPG that muddles through broad thoughts on suicidal ideation and how one comes to understand what society thinks of their worth. The look and soundscape of this game are extremely evocative formal embellishments on a very conventional approach. What is an extremely straight path frequently compels you to take in the bloody decaying sights. The world is deeply confusing but you know how to continue walking forward. Equipment seems to do nothing and sickeningly absurd weakness mechanics exist but really don't matter when you can crit every third attack. A thin and uncomfortable shell of a world trickles down to every gear of the game.

I'm pretty up and down on thecatamites and extremely at arms length when it comes to this kind of disaffected, individualistic, abstracted, and nihilistic depiction of the world that hangs over games from a supposed left, but Space Funeral is precise and throbbing and oozing and maddening. You'd think it'd be lame as shit for someone to read Baudelaire over your RPG dungeon traversal, but I'm here to tell you that it's sick as shit.

CW for Analogue: A Hate Story: torture, sui*, spousal abuse, gaslighting, child death, incest, alcoholism

A weird echo of Digital: A Love Story with a really unfortunate and poorly researched attempt to make a feminist game that barely even reaches the capacity of second-wave feminism. I played this at launch and then replayed recently for KRITIQAL's game club. What this game expresses about when and why patriarchy exists or the fact that it's told in this strange grab bag of feudal Korean "Asian stuff" is bewildering to me now as it was then. The ratio of logs to character interactions makes the historical narrative, the characters themselves (why is there both a direct prompt system and a push notification thing?), and dramatic setup for the player character on the dead ship feel completely flat. The route split happens before there is any space for either character to make more sophisticated thoughts and arguments about the game's core moral dilemma and it feels like the game shoots a better or more concise thought before anything can take off. There's some exciting stuff here in the UI that I just like more over in Digital where I don't have to deal with this strange cynnical "aren't you completely compromised picking a girl in the game where there are only route choices centered around the women" thing here.

The incredibly average first swing at 3D Ys. Bosses are fine and I really cherish the way dialogue progresses with the Rehda villagers without side-quests, but the map and the arrangement of shops and upgrades across the two towns is just so unpleasant. I enjoy the idea of being familiar with the island and abstracting time through repetition, but it's just far too much distance to travel every single time I need to upgrade my swords. Playing the worst possible release of this game on PSP did not help, but even with the fast travel on the more recent PC port I could not imagine having that much better of an impression on Ark. Strangely fine to play through despite all that because everything other than the lunge jump feel exactly like Oath, but this is a pretty skippable Ys release given how sparse the writing is or how unconsidered the map is.

A greatest hits self-insert game that is surprisingly thoughtful about how retold events would or could shift in interesting ways to orbit the new character Tokio. It is completely incomprehensible without all of the .hack// primary material and a fair amount of the secondary stuff, and even with all of the necessary pre-requisite reading it doesn't go anywhere substantial. Think of this game as a mostly disparate anthology of what if stories.

The action elements are absolutely dreadful and the amount of time you're expected to grind is unruly, so I have not yet actually seen the post credits epilogue stuff yet and I don't know if I'll even watch. The ping-pong QTE that dominates every single moment of combat is burned into my brain along with some of the offhand ship fuel moments, but this is a delight to play in short bursts (I lose my mind every time I have to rotate my Vita to read the emails) for any fans of the franchise if you don't mind stepping around a buggy fan-translation.