" Alright we're in charge of localizing this, what's the story like again? "

" The world in the near future reached such a stage of late unregulated liberalism that 2 companies have more power than every other nation combined, and they declare war against one another because they would rather destroy half the world than not have a total market monopoly. "

" Hmmm how about we change that so that capitalism is good actually and there's a shadow government manipulating those companies who are innocenet and don't know any better (also their leader is named Aurora, thats important), and when you beat them... you achieve eternal world peace? "

" Sure. "

Ico is the type of game I dread to play, critically acclaimed, landmark classic of the medium, influenced various games and designers I love. I dread playing those because of a fear I have, a fear that's come true : I don't like ICO, in fact, I think I might hate ICO. And now I will have to carry that like a millstone around my neck, "that asshole who doesn't like ICO". Its not even really that external disapproval I dread, its the very reputation that causes me to second guess my own sincerely held opinions. I thought I liked minimalism in game design, and cut-scene light storytelling and relationships explored through mechanics but I guess I don't. There's some kinda dissonance, cognitive or otherwise reading reviews by friends and writers I respect and wondering if there's something wrong with me or if I didnt get it or played it wrong or any other similar foolishness that gets bandied around in Internet discussions. "I wish we could have played the same game" I think, reading my mutuals' reviews of ICO. Not in a dismissive asshole way of accusing them of having a warped perception, but moreso in frustration that I didnt have the experience that has clearly touched them and countless others.

But enough feeling sorry for myself/being insecure, what is my problem with ICO exactly? I don't really know. Genuinely. I wasnt even planning on writing a review originally because all it would come down to as my original unfiltered reaction would be "Playing it made me miserable". Thankfully the upside of minimalism in game design is that its easier to identify which elements didnt work for me because there are few in the game. I think the people who got the most out of ICO developed some kind of emotional connection to Yorda, and thats one aspect which absolutely didn't work for me. As nakedly "gamey" and transparently artificial as Fallout New Vegas' NPCs (and Skyrim and F3 etc) locking the camera to have a dialogue tree, they read to me as infinitely more human than the more realistic Yorda; for a few reasons. Chief among them is that despite some hiccups and bugs the game is known for, you are not asked to manage them as a gameplay mechanic beyond your companions and well, my main interaction with Yorda was holding down R1 to repeatedly yell "ONG VA!" so she'd climb down the fucking ladder. She'd climb down, get halfway through and then decide this was a bad idea and ascend again.

ICO has been to me a game of all these little frustrations piling up. Due to the nature of the puzzles and platforming, failing them was aggravating and solving them first try was merely unremarkable. It makes me question again, what is the value of minimalism genuinely? There was a point at which I had to use a chain to jump across a gap and I couldnt quite make it, I thought "well, maybe theres a way to jump farther" and started pressing buttons randomly until the circle button achieved the result of letting me use momentum to swing accross. Now, if instead a non-diegetic diagram of the face buttons had shown up on the HUD instead what would have been lost? To me, very little. Sure, excessive direction can be annoying and take me out of the game, but pressing buttons randomly did the same, personally. Nor did "figuring it out for myself" feel particularly fulfilling. Thats again what I meant, victories are unremarkable and failures are frustrating. The same can be said for the combat which, honestly I liked at first. I liked how clumsy and childish the stick flailing fighting style was, but ultimately it involved hitting the enemies over and over and over and over again until they stopped spawning. Thankfully you can run away at times and rush to the exit to make the enemies blow up but the game's habit of spawning them when you're far from Yorda or maybe when she's on a different platform meant that I had to rely on her stupid pathfinding to quickly respond (which is just not going to happen, she needs like 3 business days to execute the same thing we've done 5k times already, I guess the language barrier applies to pattern recognition as well somehow) and when it inevitably failed I would have to jump down and mash square until they fucked off.

I can see the argument that this is meant to be disempowering somehow but I don't really buy it. Your strikes knock these fuckers down well enough, they just keep getting back up. Ico isnt strong, he shouldnt be able to smite these wizard of oz monkeys with a single swing, but then why can they do no damage to ICO and get knocked down flat with a couple swings? Either they are weak as hell but keep getting remotely CPRd by the antagonist or they're strong but have really poor balance. In the end, all I could really feel from ICO was being miserable. I finished the game in 5 hours but it felt twice that. All I can think of now is that Im glad its done and I can tick it off the bucket list. I am now dreading playing shadow of the colossus even harder, and I don't think I ever want to play The Last Guardian, it just looks like ICO but even more miserable. I'm sure I've outed myself as an uncultured swine who didnt get the genius of the experience and will lose all my followers but I'm too deflated to care. If there is one positive to this experience is that I kept procrastinating on finishing the game that I got back into reading. I read The Name of the Rose and Rumble Fish, pretty good reads. Im going to read Winesburg Ohio next I think.

A person's tolerance for Harold Halibut is going to depend on how much mileage they get out of slower games where inhabiting the space and conversations are the key focus, rather than anything resembling moment to moment gameplay.

I don't blame anyone who doesn't get on with that or think that any single approach is objectively better or worse, but I was drawn in by the game's beautiful handcrafted aesthetic and its hold on me never really faltered throughout the runtime. The ship you live on is full of memorable characters with their own unique idiosyncrasies, all helped along by a strong voice work - for Harold specifically there's a great balance between goofy ignorance and sentimentality, and that personality is probably one of the major factors that kept me going.

But I must emphasise again that this is a very slow game and there are quirks that come with that - sometimes your movement speed is slowed to a crawl as you'e made to follow another character, sometimes the dialogue goes on a little longer than expected, and this will put some people off. Thankfully for me, I used that time to take in the absolutely gorgeous world, animation and the small details dotted around all the locations you visit.

Ninth bar.
"My, my, my", you say as you take a sip from your 300$ cup of Dom Pérignon, "what a misstep from a professional violinist that is..."
Little did you know that only a couple of minutes later you will get blown off orbit by Alfred Schnittke, inevitably staining your way-too-expansive-for-the-average-joe-huh costume.

For a (broad) genre that is so commonly associated with elitism and bourgeoisie, using atonality in classical music has always been a hell of a thing as it directly challenges orthodox forms of Western music but also goes against the conservatism way of seeing everything under the veil of """beauty""".

Most of the droning conversations surrounding Drakengard are about its janky (to say the least) gameplay and whether or not this was Yoko Taro's intent (as if meaning slipping away from the artist's hands would undermine all artistic value).
There's little to no room for discussion about these ear-scorching violins, making a soundtrack exclusively out of unapologetically aggressive sound collages in a world of grand melodramatic orchestras and nice subtle ambient tracks is a hell of a feast from Nobuyoshi Sano and Takayuki Aihara.

Heck, I'd even argue that it doesn't even serve as a mere companion piece for Drakengard, this is as much of an incredible exploration of the cycle of violence as the whole design use of detachment from death games usually provide, and both the soundtrack and the core game are much more effective at doing so than most works wearing their "so subversive" title up their sleeves I've experienced yet.

I want more abrasive and nightmarish soundscapes to drown in, this is pure hell through and through, I am crying, I am curled up in a ball, I feel like shit, I am gasping for air, I need more.

there's something unimaginably beautiful about games that feel just like when i'm really tired with a drawing and i just decide to do whatever and put it out into the world, then i see so many wrong things with it that could have been fixed with time but then again i'm very tired so in no way i'm touching it again. makes me think how human work will forever be valuable, we're able to develop apathy for imperfections due to fatigue and that's honestly beautiful.

excluding the obvious deadline constraints the team had to put up with, this kind of ambitious, large scale, unpredictable, weird, aggravating, difficult, time consuming, tiring, agressive, livable world barely has any space in the sanitized UX focused world but yet here we are, yet after all the misinformation efforts by 20 year-certified dumbass Stephanie Sterling here we are experiencing what is probably one of the most feverish mainstream gaming efforts done by a big studio in the last decade. this is probably the most important game Capcom has released in a lot of years and i'm all here for it, because if you play the game you end up realizing the boxart is extremely funny and there are simply no other games that do this kind of thing anymore. like, my bf missed seeing a major scene with a character around the last part of the game because he never got any of the optional quests involving him how is this not pure art.

also gotta love the genre of games that you could easily swap a "thank you for playing" at the end with "fuck you for playing!!" and it would still make perfect sense. they're dear in my heart and i will protect them always

Harold Halibut is a very technically impressive (when its not bugging out or dropping frames) feat, which unfortunately puts its gorgeous claymation style and cinematography in service of an overwritten, overindulgent miserable slog which might have been refreshing were it a fifth of its length instead of the overbearing wank we got instead.

Wank is the operative word here, the game is spiritually similar to jerking off. It takes inspiration from various sources, wes anderson films chief among them, but from what few films I have seen of those, they were much more entertaining and well written. The sheer nothingness of the gameplay even for narrative focused adventure games and amount of dialogue that was 3 lines too long for what it needed to be really fits together when you learn about the game's 10 year development time. This is someone's baby, presumably a labour of love, but thats the thing, sometimes you need to detach yourself emotionally from your work and cut things when they don't actually add anything. The most damning thing of all, after all that, 8 goddamned hours (it felt twice that) I feel nothing. The game is nothing. I am nothing. We're all nothing. And I have 8 fewer hours now before I return to the nothingness of oblivion with little to show for it.

There's a story beat in Ys IX: Monstrum Nox where the large Pendleton company, the major employer within the city, has systematically disenfranchised the people of shantytown situated alongside the literal sewers. There's a chivalrous Robin Hood-esque figure who steals from the Pendleton company and gives to the poor residents, and the game's message is to admonish this figure for doing so by showing multiple scenes of the poor people being lazy and indolent and wasting the assistance on booze. The ending to this particular subplot is so blatant as to be insulting - the solution is to start your own business and show the rest of peasantry that you can climb out of the sewers with hard work (and perhaps some generous private subsidies). This is the product of Japanese sociocultural attitudes toward capitalism, much like its partners in the West. Poverty is treated as an individualist issue, one inextricably tied to moral fundamentalism. You're poor because you have bad habits. I'm rich because I work hard. It's worse than garbage writing, its some of the most irresponsible neoliberal wankery I have ever had the misfortune of experiencing. Game sucks.

100% achievements.

November 6th, 2023, marks the day I would begin my journey of playing Hellsinker. 5 months and a day to be exact. With interest spawning from a stray suggestion by a friend of mine, this would quickly result in an obsessive play-through which then graduated to an obsessive achievement hunt which would THEN go on infiltrate my personal life via absolutely wreaking havoc on my sleep schedule, even hijacking my dreams.

And I couldn't be more thankful.

Quite honestly, I'm not sure where to take this review, I'll let my fingers glide along the keyboard and post whatever crops up.

At 89.1 hours, Hellsinker sits comfortably at my #5 most played game on Steam. Despite this, I've only gone on to engage with the game in its entirety through the lens of 1 character. The game features 4 characters, 1 of which has 4 "Ordinance Packages" which change up their loadout. Essentially, this 1 character is 4 though their endings remain the same between loadouts. This leaves me with a staggering 1/7 true completion. In addition to this, each character does have a unique ending depending on their TLB progression, not viewable within the game's text sequence viewer. Though I've already gone ahead and watched a video showing their contents (SPOILERS (DUH!)), I'd still love to play the game to experience them firsthand.

Alright, what more is there left for me do? Surely after that I would have completed EVERYTHING there is to this game... right?

WRONG! THERE'S SO MUCH! THERE'S QUITE FRANKLY TOO MUCH! AND I THINK THE FUNNIEST PART HAS TO BE HOW ABSOLUTELY UNINTENDED MOST OF THE EXTRA STUFF IS!

I'll start by introducing this game's older sibling, Radio Zonde. Yes, I have played the game before, but I haven't really completed in a manner I find acceptable, so there's still this entire game for me to play. Much of the ideas regarding design both graphics and gameplay are very much seen within Hellsinker. 1CC for Radio Zonde TBD.

Following this game would then come Hellsinker but in the form of a demo, kinda? Colloquially the build is known as Hellsinker 0.95. This build is quite.... special. There's a bajillion changes from this version of the game to the Doujin and Steam releases and although I'd like to talk about them all day I'll spare this "review" the word count and cut to the main thing. This game, although presenting itself as a demo, actually holds within itself the entire game but more importantly the final stage(SPOILERS(AGAIN(DUH!))) accessible through dropping in some files graciously provided by the original poster. In a non-patched version, only stages 1-4 are playable. The cut special stages also feature 2 versions from what I understand looking at the channel. One version would then go on to become the Shrine seen in the Doujin and Steam release. The other version cut from the final releases feature something adjacent to a dungeon crawler style level (not spoilers).

Okay so. That's it right? Nothing more? There couldn't possibly be more?

But there is! All of these are from the game's Doujin release era (so like 2007-2011?) I'll tally up everything here:
>Doujin release (PURCHASED)
>Completion of said Doujin release (unsure if I'll do all characters TLB but I'll cross that bridge when I get there)
>Buying the fanzines (warning the page probably has some Not Safe For Work Ads so please use an adblocker <3 ) and then reading said fanzines (currently studying Japanese primarily for that)
>A 3D Hellsinker Railshooter fangame (Completed)
>A Puyo Puyo styled Hellsinker puzzle game (Completed)
>Another Hellsinker fangame though I don't really know what to compare this one to, check the IGDB page for more info (Completed)

...and that's it. At that point, I'll have fully exhausted myself on every possible official and unofficial expression of love for this game. Have I made it obvious enough how much I love this game?

I'm currently in ownership of pretty much every version of the game out there with their fan-patches in addition to the fan-games so if you'd like any of that please contact my either on Twitter or Discord @strawhatcanti. Thank you for reading. Until the next "review" goes up,

Keep your dignity.