Kotake Create is kind of in the unenviable position of attempting to create a follow-up to a game that works at its absolute best when you know practically nothing about it. Am I convinced that the gameplay shift they deployed here was enough to differentiate or elevate it from Exit 8? Not really!

I'm aware of my outlier state here in the sense that I was the first to review Exit 8 on Backloggd, as I played it blindly practically the minute it landed on a pirate aggregate website, and even rightfully predicted in my log for it that it'd usher in a new genre of horror-adjacent knockoffs in a flurry similar to the Backrooms pishwater that's been flushing through the Steam pipes for the past year or so. It blew me away because it navigates the unknown ~so well~, meaning I probably value the experience of playing a little higher than most who didn't get to avoid any implication as to what the game was. Exit 8 has indeed had many imitators - very few that capture what makes its incredibly simple premise and gameplay loop so innately engrossing, most of which take the form of absolute dunderhead horror pastiches where you're escaping a boarded-up Saw house or an abandoned hospital and shit like that. For what it's worth, Platform 8 plays very differently to Exit 8 and it'll probably be a refreshing change to many, I just find what this game does to be a far more standard "avoid the danger" affair than the wonderfully inquisitive design Exit 8 predicates itself on. In all honesty, I didn't expect a second bottle of lightning - but I hoped for something special I could gnaw on, and it just didn't happen.

I've followed the creative output of Shigatake for what is coming up to fifteen years now after seeing their sexy Shadow of the Colossus girl fanart as a kid. Who knew they had solo development of a game as furious and pristine as this in them? I did, I never doubted him, real recognise real.
Just such a ludicrously well-executed game that I’ve been massively enjoying bashing my skull through. Refreshingly uncomplex and a relatively short runtime, but densely populated with a daisy chain of unique blink-and-you’ll-miss-it gauntlets that keeps the warpath fresh. The kind of leanness you can only find in workhorse passion projects like this. Absolutely gorgeous too, polygons are so washed literally all you need is a diorama of parallaxed sprites.
The star of the show for me is this game’s Berserk mechanic. It’s one thing to reward the player with a score multiplier bonus for aggressive play - that’s to be expected, that’s boring - it’s another to reward the player with the opportunity to style on your enemies so hard they glow beet red and bounce around their cockpits in a fit of animalistic rage, adding new layers to their attack patterns akin to a soft difficulty boost. You couldn’t get me to care about high scores if you put a gun to my head, but you can get me to engage with your multiplier gimmick if you make engaging with it this expressive and heart-poundingly risky.
Fun as all fuck, short as you’d like it to be, Shigatake of course drew a cute human version of their ship and a ton of big-name guest artists chimed in to do their own renditions of her and you can set the main menu wallpaper to them. The release of Devil Blade Reboot coincided with a health check-up of his and he's constantly been making jokes about white poop from the white drink they gave him. The human condition.

It's Ubi, I ~do~ know what I expected, I just want to be proven wrong sometimes, you know? Won't hide that I've become a bit of an SSX fan in the past month, which has admittedly coloured what I'm looking for in an xtreme snowboarding videogame. Mostly wanted to feel the temperature on what is essentially the latest major snowboarding game released (2016) - which sadly takes the form of an incredibly desolate open world skinner box. A hugeass Forza Horizon-ified slab of Terrain, intricately designed with the care and attention of a bored child arbitrarily raising and dropping the floor height with the Sims topography tool. The polar opposite of SSX's bespoke, densely curated & arcadey racetracks; when you accept a race in Steep you just have to watch a guideline get lazily drawn over a slope, weaving between whatever random hills happen to be in the way. No personality no art direction no design no nothing. So fucking unexciting you'd think the devs suffered from extreme heart risk, so fucking sauceless you'd think it was a Welsh school dinner.

Certainly not lost on me how shallow my revisit of LBP1 was. This was something of a childhood fave of mine I threw countless hours at; be it in couch co-op with fwiends or alone in my room exploring the avalanche of user-created content people spun together. Neither of which was a factor in me revisiting it for the first time in well over a decade now (jezus farckin christ!!!!), the servers are long gone and I’d need to be the richest man alive to bribe someone to play this with me over a cocktail of Parsec + RPCS3 input lag. Nobody will ever understand the joy of slapping the aztec cock motif on your co-op partners’ faces siiiighghhh…. Still, an illuminating experience that rekindled something in my heart about what LBP1 stood for!

Admittedly, I was always more of an LBP2 kid, these games being modular meant there was very little reason to revisit the first game once the sequel came out. There is a very strong difference in vibes between the two games though, if LBP1 excels at anything, it’s in encouraging the player to go off and create for themselves. It’s kind of wild the extent to which LBP1 offers and explains its tools to the player - its relatively simple levels make no effort to hide the gadgets that make ingame events work. Stages are littered with visible emitters, tags, switches, stuff like only-slightly offscreen circuitry that you can watch move around to inform a boss of its attack patterns and phases. It feels like a child’s art project or something, a simple array of pulleys and string animating rudimentary creatures and swings. It’s all so laid bare, I kind of adore it, and is certainly a handcrafted energy that LBP2 loses in its explosion of visual polish. The constant delivery of decorations, objects, prebuilt things you can make your own edits of, it’s no wonder this game blew up in the way it did - it’s with you every step of the way and always acts as a shockingly good teacher for its own mechanics.

Anyway this was a lot of fun. Unquestionably a hilarious platforming title to insist upon having no-death run rewards when so much of your survivability hinges on Sackboy’s physics-based astrology. You don’t realise how much nostalgia you have for something until the first thirty seconds of a song makes you tear up. This kind of williamsburg scrapbook aesthetic is hard to stomach nowadays but it really works here. Holy shit I can’t believe the racist caricatures this game has in every corner, this truly is a quintessentially British game.

Honestly about still as good as I remember?

I feel like there's more to appreciate coming back to it now in a,, endearing way. It's like a collective playable synthwave album, down to how the attacks are basically a rhythm, but just jumbled around by bursts of twin stick sections and walking moments where you let the music play while a stupid pastiche narrates at you. And all of that is still really really fun to me. I'm enjoying the push and pull like normal, even if it's all rudimentary now that I've already beaten Furier and still have the muscle memory.

Which really surprised me, because I think that's the kind of opaque bullshit I would come back and go "wow this meant genuinely nothing, what the fuck did they think they were cooking?", but with all the environments and how the music sways it comes off more in the stoner sense where they THOUGHT they were being so interesting and deep but their eyes are staring blank straight through you lol. That's like the best way I can explain why it's fun to experience on a return.

It congeals together in such a way that I find myself unable to resent its very standard and now blatantly generic "phase" design. It's like yeah, I can get into it ^.=.^ I'm still banging my head to You're Mine, after all. Hilariously it makes me feel like I'm too harsh on Sekiro that This is the rhythm like action game I'm eating up today.