i'll fight you to the death, and win, if you don't like ketsui. if you don't like greg, well, you're wrong, but i guess i can respect it

personally, because i'm a dickhead, i admire that this game absolutely bombs away most strict ideas of "good design". the bullets are grey and brown on brown and grey. bombs are flawed, imperfect solutions for both offense and defense that are hard to rely on. the rank system is invisible -- yet must be constantly observed. getting anywhere with greg requires external study and theory which is enacted with guesswork and risk. (though the "all in" feeling of cranking your autofire and finally fully powering yourself up to try to burn the end of the game down before the rank catches up with you -- this is a rare thrill in games). the best player ships are crossovers from mahou daisakusen, unlockable via cheat code. and yet i still love this game!

a particularly interesting and undersung thing about garegga is how scoring works. we generally think of scoring as an extra rule or two to follow, a covenant, a loop. medal chaining serves this purpose to a degree, but it's not the heart of the game's scoring -- which is about oddly-balanced score values, tick points and how you get the damn medals to appear in the first place. medal chaining is simply there to link all these little stunts together

each stage in greg has a massive amount of inscrutable scoring rules which, again, are never said to the player. bomb the pipes for extra points, destroy the tanks while they're on the houses, bomb the flamingoes, self-destruct into the blimps. bosses even moreso -- a scoring run of garegga is tasked with a very systemic dismantling of the various intricate mechanical bosses not unlike reading a technical manual in reverse. no, you fucking idiot, you were supposed to destroy that part with a non-piercing shot!

if you can surmount the tragedy of having to look up scoring information on the internet, this does a lot for the game -- each stage feels and plays so differently, is always asking different things of you, yet always does nothing more than use the basic tools of shooting, moving, managing your options, and bombing.

as with the rank system, it's up to the aspiring player to put it all together and succeed -- which means constantly juggling resource against resource, constantly asking if you should burn a life to appease the rank demon or hold onto it for a safety with no future, constantly wondering how low your power should be for a given section, micro-managing bomb fragments. greg makes you sweat the small stuff.

this level of absolute detail, this level of nurnied out machine-like inelegant intricacy, is frankly incompatible with having to explain everything twice every five seconds. something has to give way, and this game is of an older era where it was friendliness who'd generally give way. i love you greg

One of those epochal clashes between dirty, abrasive, endearing eco-romance and cute, sinister Y2K-era techno-optimism turned satire of imperialism. These angles lock arms in a subtle but ever-looming creation story of what video games, as puzzle boxes and a storytelling medium, could become in the new millennium. Love-de-Lic finally mastered this kind of anti-RPG disguising a clever adventure, and L.O.L's occasional flaws rarely distract from the majesty and sheer emotional gamut this offers. Here's a Gaia of broken promises, uprooted existence, twisted social covenants, and how to survive and adapt in a harsh universe where we're the only love we give.

Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Jan. 31 – Feb. 6, 2023

If Moon RPG was a thesis polemic and UFO a dissertation, then Lack of Love was Kenichi Nishii & co.'s post-doctorate trial by fire. The era of overly experimental, often commercially unviable projects like this on PlayStation, SEGA Saturn, and now Dreamcast was slowly in decline. Almost all the post-bubble era investment capital needed to support teams like them would filter increasingly into stable, more conservative groups and companies working on console games. In a sense, they saw themselves as a dying breed, the kind that gets stomped all over in this year-2000 cautionary tale. I'm just glad Ryuichi Sakamoto helped produce this and get it to market, especially given the system's poor performance in Japan. His music and environmentalist/anti-capitalist stance stick out at times throughout the story, but he's mainly taking a backseat and giving Love-de-Lic their last chance to create something this ambitious together. In all the years since, the studio's staff diaspora has led to countless other notable works, and parts of L.O.L. both hint at those while revealing what was lost.

We're far from Chibi-Robo or the Tingle spinoffs here, after all. Lack of Love shows unwavering confidence in the player's ability to roleplay as this evolving, invisibly sentient creature who experiences many worlds on one planet, both native and invasive. Every real or fake ecosystem we travel to, whether by accident or in search of respite, offers enough challenge, task variation, and indulgent audiovisuals to keep one going. I wish I could say that for more players, though. It might not reach the difficulty and obtuseness of much older graphic adventures from the Sierra and Infocom glory years, but I've seen enough people who like classic games bounce off this one to know it's a hard ask. You have no choice but to poke, prod, and solve each environment with verbs you'd normally never consider, such as simply sleeping in a spot for longer than feels comfortable or, well, interesting. It's more than beatable, but I won't begrudge anyone for watching this or relying on a walkthrough. LDL designed L.O.L to be dissected, not gulped down. Tellingly, though, the game starts and ends with a titanic beast possibly devouring you unless you act quickly, instinctively perhaps.

One moment that frustrated me, but also revealed the genius behind it all, was trying to race the bioluminescent flyers on level 5. By this point I've transformed a few times, having become a frilly flightless fellow with plenty of brawn and speed. Darting across this mixture of bizarre swamp, desert, and grassland terrain has led to what feels like a softlock, a set of plant walls I can only squeeze by if I use the right tool. Lack of Love succeeds in telegraphing points of interest for most puzzles, be it the obvious dirt starting line for the night races in this grove, or the cold and minimalistic off-world objects and structures seen later. What's never as obvious is how exactly to interact with other creatures for more complex tasks. Helping out by killing a larger bully or retrieving a parent's lost child is straightforward, but something as simple as just entering the race used a good hour of my time here. Oh sure, I could win the race all right…but it took way too long for the game to recognize and reward me, forcing another long wait from night to day and back again since there's only one lap a cycle.

I recognize that my impatience got in the way of just accepting this, one of life's many setbacks. So I simply waited all day and half a night to repeat the ritual until I got it right. A majority of L.O.L's dialogue with players and critics comes down to how it considers rituals, those habits justified & unjustified which define our daily lives. If anything, the interrogation of normalized behaviors, and the true intentions or lack of them hiding behind, define the studio's short career. As I gorged on helmet-headed stilt walkers and headbutted tree-nuts to slurp up their fruit, it dawned on me how well this game handles repetition. Many times did I get entranced into calling, roaring, and pissing all over each map to see if some cool event or interaction could happen where it'd make sense. Most of these levels are well-built for quickly crossing from one relevant hotspot to another. That desire to see it all through, no matter when I got humiliated or had to slog past something I'd solved but failed to do just right at just the right moment…it makes all of this worthwhile.

Progression throughout Lack of Love isn't usually this janky or unintuitive though. The game's main advancement system, the psychoballs you collect to activate evolution crystals, accounts for skipping the befriending process with some of your neighbors. It makes this a bit more replayable than usual for the genre, as you can leave solving the tougher riddles to a repeat run while continuing onward. I wish there wasn't anything as poorly built as this firefly race, or the somewhat tedious endgame marathon where your latest form can't run. But while that impedes the game's ambitions somewhat, it usually isn't a dealbreaker. LDL's crafted an impressive journey out of life's simplest moments, pleasures, and triumphs over adversity, from your humble start inside a hollow tree to the wastes of what the eponymous human resettling project has wrought. There's only a few "special" moves you can learn, from dashing to

In short, L.O.L. is a study of contrasts: the precious, vivacious yet forever dangerous wilds of this planet vs. the simpler, stable yet controlling allure of organized systems and societies. Nothing ever really works out in nature, not even for the apex predators like me. Yet everything has to work according to some plan or praxis in any form of civilization, something made possible through explicit communication. Love de Lic's challenge was to treat players with as much respect for their intelligence as possible before giving them something inscrutable—no straight line to triumph. This game had to feel alien, but still somehow understandable for its themes and messages to resonate. It's an unenviable goal for most developers. Just ask former LDL creators who have moved on to more manageable prospects. Obscurantism is a mixed blessing all throughout the experience, and I can't imagine this game any other way.

The opening level at least prepares you for the long, unwieldy pilgrimage to enlightenment through a few key ways. Popping out of the egg, swimming to shore, and the camera panning over a creature evolving via silver crystals gives a starting push. Then there's the initial "call for help", a newborn creature struggling to get up. Getting your first psychoball requires not aggression, but compassion for other ingenues like you. On the flipside, you end up having to kill a predator much larger and stronger than yourself, just to save harmless foragers. I definitely wish the game did a better job of avoiding this Manichean binary for more of the psychoball challenges, but it works well this early on. Maybe the initially weird, highly structured raise-the-mush-roof puzzle west of start was a hint of more involved sequences either planned or cut down a bit

Crucially, the following several stages demonstrate how Lack of Love's alien earth is far from some arcadian paradise. The game simply does not judge you for turning traitor and consuming the same species you just helped out; regaining their trust is usually just as easy. One look at the sun-cracked, footstep-ravaged wasteland outside your cradle portends further ordeals. LDL still wants you to succeed, however. The start menu offers not only maps + your current location for most levels, but a controls how-to and, most importantly, a bestiary screen. It's here where each character's name offers some hint, small or strong, pointing you towards the right mindset for solving their puzzle. Matching these key names with key locations works out immediately, as I figured out with the "shy-shore peeper" swimming around the level perimeter. Likewise, the next stage brought me to a labyrinth of fungi, spider mites, and two confused gnome-y guys who I could choose to reunite. Taking the world in at your own pace, then proceeding through an emotional understanding each environment—it's like learning how to breathe again.

L.O.L finds a sustainable cadence of shorter intro levels, quick interludes, and larger, multi-part affairs, often split up further by your evolution path. Giving three or five psychoballs to the crystal altars sends you on a path of no return, growing larger or more powerful and sometimes losing access to creatures you may or may not have aided. The music-box pupating and subsequent analog spinning to exit your shell always pits a grin on my face. Rather than just being punctuation for a numbers game (ex. Chao raising in Sonic Adventure, much as I love it), every evolution marks a new chapter in the game's broader story, where what you gain or lose with any form mirrors the existential and environmental challenges you've faced. As we transition from the insect world to small mammals and beyond, the heal-or-kill extremes ramp up, as do the level designs. I wouldn't call Love-de-Lic's game particularly mazy or intricate to navigate, but I learned to consult the map for puzzles or sleeping to activate the minimap radar so I could find prey. It'd be easy for this evolve-and-solve formula to get stale or ironically artificial, yet LDL avoids this for nearly the whole runtime!

Early hours of traipsing around a violent but truly honest little universe give way to a mysterious mid-game in which L.O.L. project puppet Halumi intervenes in the great chain of being. An impossibly clean, retro-futurist doll of a destroyer plops down TVs in two levels, each showing a countdown to…something big. Nothing good, that's for sure, and especially not for the unsuspecting locals you've been trying to live with. So far it's mostly just been a couple short tunes and Hirofumi Taniguchi's predictably fascinating sound design for a soundscape, but now the iconic tune "Artificial Paradise" starts droning in the background. Musical ambiance turns to music as a suite, a choreographed piece overriding the vocals and cries you know best. Then the terraformer bots come, and the game introduces another stylistic dalliance: the disaster movie removed from civilization. We've gone from colorful, inviting, mutualistic landscapes to invaded craggy rocksides, a very survival horror-ish insect hive where you play Amida with worker bugs, and a suspiciously utopian "final home" for our alien cat and others just like us.

The final levels satisfyingly wrap all these loose threads into a narrative on the ease with which precarious lives and ecology fall prey to not just the horrors of colonization, but the loss of that mystery needed to keep life worth living. Neither you nor the last creatures you help or save have time or dignity left as the L.O.L. project faces its own consequences, radiating across the world in turn. But I'm familiar with that shared dread and understanding of what it's all coming to, as someone living through destructive climate change my whole lifetime. How does one carry on in a land you remember functioning before it was poisoned? What can family, friends, mutual interests, etc. do against the tide of sheer, uncaring war or collapse?

There's a definite rage hiding behind Love-de-Lic's minimalist approach, only rising to the surface at the game's climax. You can taste the proverbial cookie baked with arsenic, a barbed attitude towards living through these times after growing up hoping and expecting a bright tomorrow. To make it out of this world alive takes a lot of seriousness, but also heart and a sense of humor, which Lack of Love never lets you forget. The ending sequence had me beyond relieved, overjoyed yet mournful about how no environmentalist hero's journey of this sort seems to work beyond the plane of fiction. Is it a lack of love consuming us, or the forced dispersion of it? L.O.L. justifiably refuses to give a clear answer, something even its developers are searching for. It's not the most sophisticated kind of optimistic nihilism anyone's imbued in a work, but a very fitting choice for this adventure.

Plot and thematic spoilers ahead

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Friendship, whether convenient or desirable on its own, becomes even more important during the second robot attack you suffer through. A mutual species has been living with your newfound family, and one of these more plant-/shroom-shaped fellows is still mourning their dead feline pal near the bottom of the map. Yet again, though, rituals and routines like the egg worship above supplant the ignored pain and due diligence owed in this community. Shoving the guy away from an incoming bulldozer, only to get squashed yourself, is the most you end up doing in this apocalypse. It only gets worse after awakening not in the natural world, but an eerie facsimile of it, built aboard the L.O.L. spaceship that we saw dive into the planet with a virus' silhouette. Even highly-evolved lifeforms, now able to talk in bursts and build a structured society, lose sight and make mistakes. But only humanity can play God for these fauna and flora, such that you're imprisoned in a hell superficially resembling home.

Gone are the toils of comprehending other species, or stumbling haphazardly through situations that should have killed you long ago. All that Halumi and the humans want from you, their obscure object of desire, is to pass basic push-and-pull block mazes. Imagine sitting down for your high school exams, having studied the world and its intricacies for so long, only for them to hand you an arcane IQ test. There's no assumption of ecological intelligence in the robot's data banks or AI model, just a delight in watching you wriggle through Backrooms Sokoban. Halumi merely chuckles as you clear each room, then lures you into an abstract abyss of phosphenes just to play tag. We then watch the banal. comically on-the-nose mission video recounting humanity's failure to manage their own planet and ecosystem, meaning they must export their hopes, dreams, waste, and destruction to another. Some reward for getting this far in a contrived, worthless series of "tests" they're apparently obligated to perform.

And you'll quickly notice your suffering isn't that unique, either. The quote-unquote habitat caging you is policed by Halumi's robots and, more bizarrely, flying baby androids dispensing this game's send-up of pet food. It's clearly nothing too healthy or appropriate for the menagerie of organic inhabitants imprisoned on this ark. They're literally shitting themselves everywhere they go after eating! And those who fail the tests get treated as literal waste, too. Falling into the scrap closet, with its once-pristine walls peeling and the remaining animals suffering without dignity, shows the depths that this whole "sustainable" planetary resettlement program has sunk to. Some might say the game gets much too unsubtle at this point, which I can agree with. But given the current state of poaching, zoos-as-businesses, habitat displacement, industrial ranching, and careless pet adoption in our own world, maybe these messages work best when they're blunt. Halumi forcing his units to not kill, study, and presumably burn you up after just for failing a test is perhaps the only sign of remorse this antiseptic dungeon offers.

Impressing Halumi with each test comes to a head when we're given a Hobson's choice: the hilariously, insultingly ugly baby-bot or the friend we had sacrificed our safety for back in the pridelands. Predictably, you get thrown in the trash again for making the better choice. Choosing the infant, and all that humanity represents through Halumi and their army, merely makes you a glorified pet for the robot, stuck in the same fancy hotel room as two other dubiously lucky critters (plus Dave Bowman on the bed, out of camera—IDK, this feels like a 2001 reference just as much as the game's intro). Did I mention we haven't evolved for quite a while now? Guess what you become next: an awkward, baleful mirror of the baby from earlier, unable to run and too oversized for these new comforts purportedly made with kids in mind.

No one's at home here, not even the robots if that's even a concept they're built to comprehend (which I doubt). We may be out of hell, but this purgatory isn't much better. After helping the alligator with the shower and the flowery bloke with table manners, the soft but melancholy downtempo lounge of Sakamoto's "Dream" rings out from the hi-fi stereo. Beyond being one of my new favorite melodic ambient songs in any soundtrack, it perfectly conveys how much these "successful" test animals have lost, something we're used to even as we resist the circumstances. It's their last respite, just as playing this game might, for some, be an escape from our own degrading world in which we're seemingly powerless to stop the bleeding.

To the master robot's credit, they aren't too keen on keeping us here at all costs. Halumi's got big plans to fulfill, as they're quick to shoo us off from the ship's bridge. A quick peek outside the rocket shows the beginnings of an American-style highway going nowhere good, and an abnormal dust storm blowing every which way. I tried looking at my map here and found, to both horror and amusement, that there is no map at this point in Lack of Love. The protagonist's been disconnected from the outside world for so long, and exposed to the hubris and demystification of these captors, that only what intuition's left can lead the way out of here. L.O.L gives you compelling, frustrating predicament: stay in the Artificial Paradise—the map of the realm consuming the realm itself, Borges' fabled copy corrupting and then replacing the original—or finish your pilgrimage, an impossible trek through a ruined, desiccated, hopeless bastardization of home?

LDL already knows I'm going to press onward. That’s what they taught me, this new citizen of the earth, right from the start! And of course it's painful, having nothing to feed on as I crawl desperately towards a far-off exit, saving a primate friend in the process. But hope re-emerges when reuniting with that friend from the village, waiting so long to see if we're okay. The story's optimistic views on mutualism within anarchy finally collide with all the forced order and folly of its antagonists. Few moments in video games feel as biting and final as this last set-piece, a forced run away from falling tectonic plates as the L.O.L project finally collapses under the weight of all its systemic damage to the planet. We also have one last metamorphosis, saving you from death by hunger and replacing the corrupted infant form with one resembling an early human, alternating between running on twos and fours. All the player's achievements, elation, and suffering have built up to this, whether there's survival or mere death waiting at the end.

In the end, L.O.L. opts for a happy ending it's done everything to suggest can't happen. The planet rejects the virus, despite having deteriorated so much it loses its magnetic field. All of Halumi and the robots' systems suffer systemic collapse, preventing much more fatal consequences had they continued sapping the global lifeforce. Most importantly, our "hero" and boon companion crest the mountain in time to witness god rays breaking through the storm that had slowed us and threatened doom. I put hero in quotes because, just as with Moon RPG a few years prior, Nishii can't let us leave this fantasy as models to be revered, icons of victory beyond reproach. Even our protagonist had to invade, predate, and take from others their tokens of trust and acceptance, all to reach this point. But in an imperfect reality, this hardly makes us the villain either. This remarkably smart, courageous, and wise duo prevailed against odds not to prove something or selfishly leave this world behind, but to support each other during an eschatological nightmare. Just as that lack of love nearly ruined this world, the overwhelming abundance of it is finally enough to get you and someone else through the end times. Even if it didn't work, would it not have been worth it?

Our story passes on into collective memory, but Halumi's is just beginning. They're an embarrassment to their creators' hopes and whims, the once innocuous but now disgraced mascot of colonialism. Moreover, bots like Halumi and the minions are simply expendable metal to forge anew. L.O.L. ain't gonna stop at just one failure on a single planet, not with humanity's future at stake. So they'll try their luck elsewhere, and probably destroy that wandering rock in the name of civilization. But not this world. This once dominant predator from the heavens is just another vulnerable denizen now, and that's what frees them. The giant who once wielded an army and crushed all biomes to bits now gingerly steers clear of the smallest critter it meets. Halumi's learned to love the world as it is, not from orders on high or as a sandbox to redevelop. And so the circle of life incorporates one more host, a guilty conscience on the way to carving a new, more empathetic destiny from what's left.

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End of spoilers

One has to wonder how delicately and effortlessly this game touches on something as complicated as anarchy vs. hierarchy. Both protagonist and antagonist ultimately seek a place in their world: a mercurial, fluid entity among the bio-sprawl, or a cybernetic King Canute damming the primordial ocean of life and commanding its tides. There's a clear throughline from Moon RPG's evil-hero-good-interloper dynamic to the equivalent in this game, but L.O.L. sees room for redemption. It avoids the easy pessimism this premise could thrive upon, albeit not by asserting humanity's exceptionalism in the face of catastrophe. Halumi's just one more anthropomorphic tool exploited by the powers that be to accomplish their foolhardy wars on worlds they think are beneath them. This weaponized cuteness only works until the illusion of respectability or shared gain has evaporated; now they're just a tin can ready to rust away on an abandoned Eden. It's time to stop fighting. It's time to survive.

Lack of Love leaves me wanting despite all that it's evoked from me. Another late-game stage expanding on the prairie village's growing pains, and the tensions between tribe mentality and complex new hierarchies, would have made me rate this even higher. The best bits sometimes get drowned over tetchy player controls, or poorly telegraphed puzzle designs in a few spots. And there aren't quite enough rewards for exploration like I'd hoped, with areas like the desert near the end feeling very barren of interaction or secrets off the expected path. But these all point to the constraints, low budget, and limited time Love-de-Lic had to realize a vision so ambitious that few are trying anything like it today. More privileged groups like mid-2000s Maxis struggled to realize their own comprehensive story of life growing from nothing and adapting to everything. And then there's fanciful but less compelling evolution legends such as EVO: The Search for Life and its PC-98 predecessor. Still I love those projects for their own ambitions, just as I've got nothing but love for L.O.L, warts and all.

Sadly the general public and most game fans either didn't know about it or had other priorities, leaving Love-de-Lic to disband and try their design approach elsewhere. How sad but fitting that any indelible interactive story this ahead of the times should find rejection until decades later. From what interviews and retrospectives we have, it seems as though Nishii, Sakamoto, and others understood this would be the company's end. There's no glory there, just a resignation to the harshness of the video games market and what it quickly excludes from view. All I want now is for you to try giving this a little love, too. Do for L.O.L. now what was improbable when it released into an uncaring media landscape all those years ago. For lack of a better answer to this indignity, I've ended up playing one of my new favorite games, and maybe you could too.

ᴀʟʟ ᴛʜᴇꜱᴇ ᴡᴏʀʟᴅꜱ ᴀʀᴇ ʏᴏᴜʀꜱ ᴇxᴄᴇᴘᴛ ᴇᴜʀᴏᴘᴀ
ᴀᴛᴛᴇᴍᴘᴛ ɴᴏ ʟᴀɴᴅɪɴɢ ᴛʜᴇʀᴇ
ᴜꜱᴇ ᴛʜᴇᴍ ᴛᴏɢᴇᴛʜᴇʀ
ᴜꜱᴇ ᴛʜᴇᴍ ɪɴ ᴘᴇᴀᴄᴇ -quote from 2010: The Year We Make Contact

Mason Lindroth is mostly known for the Hylics games, which is perfectly justified since they're great. However, in this review I wanted to highlight a smaller game of his that I think deserves more attention than it gets.

Muldulamulom is a short (like 30 minute long) metriodvania esque platformer made for the Ludum Dare 40 game jam. It's made in unity and has the same sense of style that permeates across the Hylics games.

As you would probably expect, this game looks great. Mason Lindroth's signature psychedelic claymation style is absolutely killer, and there's really nothing like it out there.

While Hylics went the RPG route, Muldulamulom is instead a platformer. To my surprise, it actually plays pretty well. The movement and animation is generally really smooth, and there's a good sense of progression throughout the game. You'll unlock new items such as bombs and a flying carpet, and the way these are drip fed to the player during the game's short runtime is pretty well done.

Muldulamulom at its core is short and sweet. With its very short length and being playable in your browser, you can't go wrong with giving it a shot. If you're a fan of Hylics or Mason Lindroth's work in general, I would absolutely urge you to play it as well.

If you're interested, I'll leave a link to the game's Itch.io page down below.

https://mason-lindroth.itch.io/muldulamulom

Your honor, I'm afraid you are mistaken, my client wasn't leaving bombs in the middle of the street, just highly explosive guns!

Muldulamulom describes itself as a ''small metroidvania with focus on graphics'' and yeah, I think that's a pretty fair summary of the whole experience. It wasn't the worst thing I've played, not by a longshot, but I really didn't enjoy my time in this LSD looking world.

I may have grown too accustomed at the high quality short games I've played during this years (some of them being from game jams themselves), but I really don't think that has cloud my judgement in any way, this game is just... not great, sadly.

And it's really a shame 'cause... looks at it! The game has such an incredible visual style, one that I could only define ''surrealism meets Claymation'', and the result is this fantastic look that... isn't unique to it. Mason Lindroth also created Hylics, which Muldulamulom basically borrows it's entire visual identity from, which in tandem makes it have much less personality, and not even the kinda cool Commodore-esque sounds can save it. If it was the first game like this or the first game made by the creator I could pass it, but as it stands, this game just feels like it doesn't have anything to show or say. It just... exists, and what ends up dragging it completely down is the level design.

I guess you could call it a Metroidvania, but I guess you could also call Luigi ''Green Mario''. It has the skeleton and the base of a Metroidvania, but it just leaves it at that: you go left, grab and object, go right, grab an object, repeat. It doesn't seem to even try to communicate where you need to go, and while it's short duration and cool ideas like the bombs being able t break pretty much everything do help, the frustrating controls, like an unresponsive jump and a annoying way to control the flying carpet, are the final blood-stain that seals the crime-scene.

I understand why some could get enjoyment out of this, and in all honestly, I would love it if Mason Lindroth tried it again at this style of game, expanding in both duration and design, 'cause I really think he can pull an entire Metroidvania off if he wants to. For now, I can only say there was an attempt, an earnest attempt, but one that as it stands, it has too many open wounds and faults.

Your honor, I rest my case.

The fallen leaves tell the story of an arborescent world order decaying from the inside out. The Land Between is slowly cracking away at the seams as its twilight draws ever closer.

This is the world that FromSoftware shows the player, a world in which we are left to pick up fragments of a bygone past piece by piece as we fight against the forces that seek to uphold the ways of old.

This world we are shown is a not-so-subtle metaphor for our own world, a world that so desperately clings onto the ideas of old (capitalism) in the hopes their old world order won’t buckle to the pressure of history and the forces of progress itself, that force being you, the Tarnished.

Elden Ring is a game of stagnation, a game that challenges the very essence of the series it originates from, a game that seeks to take the Soulsborne formula to its logical end point and burn it all down in order to start anew. In some ways it succeeds at doing this, in other ways it doesn’t, and I think the ways it succeeds at this overshadow even its most glaring failures.

The gameplay here is refined to the best it can be; it feels as though every weapon was meticulously crafted to allow for some of the most varied and unique build variety I’ve seen in a Souls game. The open-world especially lends well to enhancing the variety of Elden Ring due to its non-linear nature, which allows for some of the most freedom in exploration and gameplay I’ve seen in a modern AAA title. I sometimes feel that the gameplay, however, was so streamlined and improved to such a degree it can sometimes feel sterile in a sense. I miss the roughness and edge to the older Souls games which I feel isn't present in From's newer games. There’s times, however, where this freedom can become overwhelming and lead to parts of the world feeling either bloated with meaningless content (excess copy-and-paste bosses and dungeons) or completely barren, a problem that could have been easily remedied if the map itself was slightly reworked to be a tad bit smaller. I feel as though a rework of the map that makes it more compact and tight would have greatly benefited Elden Ring and led to the game feeling less unbalanced in the way it presented its content. Even in spite of all that, there’s a genuine understated beauty to the world of Elden Ring that I cannot deny. This world is beautiful at times, and even in its rotting and decaying state, there are still shreds of beauty left that are worth holding on to.

Moving on from the gameplay, I feel that Elden Ring truly shines narratively and thematically the most. One may be quick to write Elden Ring off as a rehash of Souls, which to an extent is a take that isn’t without its merit. I, however, believe that it’s continuity with and rupture away from Soulsborne narrative similarities that this game truly gets interesting; it feels like a meta-self-examination and final nail in the coffin for these ideas. Elden Ring has many similarities to Dark Souls; often times, the main narrative similarity people point to is the concept of a dying world held in stasis that we are forced to decide the fate of, but what Elden Ring does with this concept is far more brilliant than people give it credit for.

Elden Ring is not just taking Souls narrative and gameplay concepts to their logical end points; it’s also burning them down. Elden Ring is Miyazaki’s pivotal turning point, where he realises that this formula is not going to be sustainable forever and that it’s necessary to accelerate these ideas to their end points and then burn it all down (symbolically done through the burning of the Erdtree).

To further understand the significance of the Erdtree, I must draw upon the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

In their follow-up book to Anti-Œdipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guatarri describe two forms of organisation: rhizomatic (non-hierarchical) and arborescent (hierarchical). These two forms of organisation are obviously references to plants, with arborescence referring to trees with a central root system and trunk and rhizomes referring to potatoes and their decentralised, free-flowing root system, to put it simply. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze uses these plant metaphors as a way to explain and illuminate the flaws of certain organisational structures and forms, with arborescent structures having one key flaw: their dependency on each other. If one part of the structure dies, rots, breaks, etc., the rest will follow suit, as they are dependent on each other.

Now, with this understanding of arborescence, we can tie it to the Erdtree and its functionality within the narrative of Elden Ring. In Elden Ring, the Erdtree serves as a monument that represents and upholds the old world; it maintains order and allows the world to continue as it is, but if this order is threatened or destroyed, the very same old world order it once upheld will crumble soon thereafter. It is through the actions of The Tarnished that we are able to light this arborescent structure ablaze and accelerate history forward (I would use this as a jumping-off point to explain Mark Fisher’s idea of accelerationism (not to be confused with Landian accelerationism)and how it ties into the story of Elden Ring, but this review is already too long as is).

Elden Ring is a story of stagnation and rebirth.

I ultimately see Elden Ring and, more specifically, its Frenzied Flame ending as a rejection and rupture away from the ideas of the old and an embrace of more radical new forms and ideas, while also staying in continuity with the general style of Soulsborne. For all of its flaws, of which this game has many, I firmly believe it’s a bold new step in the right direction. I believe that Elden Ring is not only the end of an era, but a new beginning and continuation into a new, radical, and free era of expression and creativity from Miyazaki and his team.

     ‘But when negative thoughts hit you, let it pass, and keep living.’

Played with BertKnot.

The modern legacy of Sonic the Hedgehog is a series of experiments, which seek to reassess the place of the iconic hedgehog in the cultural landscape. Representative of a 1990s and 2000s zeitgeist, he has become obsolete and outdated with the modern conception of rebellion. This does not mean that the fans have abandoned their beloved mascot, but rather that, in a long spell in the wilderness, they have sought to modernise the character themselves. The multiplication of fanworks with very different atmospheres pleads for the versatility of Sonic and his friends, as comfortable in an urban pop setting as in more slice of life stories. The Sonic Mania MAP collaboration (2019) illustrates this plasticity, with the hero naturally switching between graphic styles. In particular, the pastel and shimmering palettes work successfully; this same aesthetic quality can be found in the comic strip adaptation of Sonic Skyline (2015), where the angular lines contrast nicely with the candy colours.

For the official franchise, the situation is more difficult. In the midst of games that were widely disliked by fans, Sonic Mania (2017) was a saving grace, but it felt like an exception, nowhere near the vision of the Sonic Team. It was only with Sonic Frontiers (2022) that the community saw a tentative change in the treatment of the hero, for better or worse. Regardless of the quality of the title, the open-world opus attempted to meet the demands of the fans by offering something new, a much-needed breath of fresh air. Surprisingly, The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog seems to be another attempt to do just that.

Released on the 1st of April, the title was presented as a joke, offering a short visual novel adventure interspersed with light arcade sequences that somewhat overstay their welcome. The player assumes the role of a railway employee who is hosting a murder party for Sonic and Amy's friends in honour of the girl's birthday. Once everyone has learned their roles, the party splits up and the investigation begins, with Sonic as the victim. The player accompanies Tails, disguised as a detective, to identify the culprit. The title is generally very linear and simplistic: the protagonists arrive in a new room and have to solve the small mystery behind it, which often involves establishing the alibi of the people there. The title is obviously inspired by the success of franchises such as Ace Attorney and Danganronpa, which have now spread to the West, and this is underlined by the structure of the investigation.

Rather, the title strives to accumulate references to past games with a certain subtlety, creating a soft and warm atmosphere. To support the slice of life aspect, some characters have their personalities bent to fit the mood of the game – this is the case with Shadow. There is a certain modesty that makes the game feel like a comic book chapter or a Saturday cartoon episode. The stakes are low and the mystery is trivial, but that is not the title's main concern. The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog is about creating an experience that is different from the recent games from the Sonic Team – who are not involved in the production of this spin-off. The title appeals directly to fans, and Sonic's words of encouragement to the protagonist are a testament to his sincerity and genuine desire to nurture a loyal community.

It may be a shame to point this out, but The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog, while a harmless experience, reveals the franchise's structural problems. Caught up in its own nostalgia and struggling to innovate around a character from another era, the Sonic Team proved incapable of coming up with a subversive and fresh concept. The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog manages to do so, but the title is still plagued by being an April Fool's joke, and only seen as such by SEGA. There's something about the company's management that prevents them from really trusting a new generation that might have insights to offer on a truly major project. The title could have been an expanded experience with additional storylines, making it a proper text-based adventure around the franchise's beloved characters. Instead, the Sonic Social Team was only given the opportunity to make an appetiser.

The title is undoubtedly cute, features beautiful artworks and is brimming with love for the franchise. One must acknowledge the delight that various fans have experienced from spending two hours with it. However, I cannot help but feel that it is little more than a few crumbs for a starving community – perhaps this is the reaction of someone who has never had any affection or nostalgia for the blue hedgehog. Either way, The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog is a harmless little experience that says very little, but is a step in an interesting direction. One can only hope that this is not just another fleeting idea from SEGA, but something that will be more fully developed and polished in the future. Sonic fans deserve other similar games, or titles that explore new thematic horizons that would truly modernise the franchise.

This game, "study," I mean, feels as though an amateur YouTube video essayist took one look at the average console gamer after playing The Beginner’s Guide and thought of putting their own spin on it but presented in the most preachy, condescending, and obnoxious way possible.

This “study” (which it insists upon calling itself) is an incredibly tacky and obnoxious attempt at teaching contemporary console gamers basic terms and interactive storytelling techniques utilised in games; there was absolutely no tact in the way it presented its ideas, which, while purposefully meant to parallel the very games it examines and critiques, still doesn’t lend itself to being a very interesting or engaging experience but instead like a series of flashcards paired alongside boring gameplay segments. (Which control like absolute shit btw)

This game study felt like a lab-grown, inauthentic attempt at being a sort of modern take on The Beginner's Guide catered to modern audiences who need simple ideas and terms bashed over their heads while keys are jingled in their faces; this was a complete waste of an hour.

Comme d'habitude je vais pas faire une review très détaillée
Le jeu a des idées de fou de mise en scène vidéoludique, qui utilise le système de visage auquel on peut modifier les expressions, et le splitscreen entre ce qu'on perçoit et le visage qui perçoit, pour offrir des moments vraiment vertigineux qui déploient en plus des concepts en relation avec d'autres œuvres qui m'ont obsédé, le jeu va très loin dans sa confection du mystère meta-narratif, à tel point que le jeu peut-être une réflexion supplémentaire sur le mystère concocté à la Lynch, et sur l'invitation qu'on offre à ce mystère irrésolu dans notre cerveau.
Au niveau des défauts, certaines fins qui obligent à trouver les bons visages pendant l'interrogation peuvent être un peu redondant avec le système de reload, ça a un peu brisé l'immersion vertigineuse que j'avais au début, et ça empiète sur le mystère général de pouvoir refaire les choses en boucle pour moi. Mais ultimement ça vaut le coup

Tetsuya Takahashi: "i skimmed the abstract of like 5 different philosophy books and arthur c clarke novels and i'm here to just vomit all that back at you for 70 hours without saying anything meaningful about any of it"

Me: "sounds bad"

Tetsuya Takahashi: "i've also included kung-fu and robots"

Me: "sounds sick"

Yoko Taro: (furiously taking notes)