Scratching the back walls of my brain stem trying to prove myself wrong here but I genuinely think this is the first game I actually purchased all year lmao. Sometimes something goes terribly wrong in the lab and what should have really just been a webtoon or something mutates into a game you have to purchase on steampowered dot com. I'll take the fall here I guess, I honestly just squinted and spun around in my desk chair until I thought I was playing DokeV my beloved.
Dreams is Basically Splatoon but worse by every conceivable measure by orders of magnitude it's honestly impressive that they had the fucking nerve in the first place. The way the ink mechanic is replaced with TF2 sprays you just thinly lather the map with like a thin layer of jam on toast. The way I am CONVINCED some of these art assets are AI-generated-but-don't-quote-me-on-that. I think it'll be a hit honestly. Fifty squazillion players. Watch this space. Screenshot this review and show it to me ten years from now and tell me I was wrong.

Beneath a fading silver sky, I found myself locked in a timeless dance of catch with a stranger.

Good +30

Our hands connected across the expansive field through the shared rhythm of a baseball's flight, while our hearts bridged the chasm of anonymity with every gentle toss.

Good +30

Amidst the soft thud of the catch, we listened heartfully to stories that spilled like fragments of a soul's journey.

Normal +20

Each throw, a moment shared, a piece of the intricate mosaic of their life.

Perfect! +50

Despite some abso luxurious artwork and presentation here I'm left a little dry. One of the problems I keep running into w/ the princessmaker genre is in how little these games do to offer emergent expressions of lifegoal improv, i guess? Like once your child hits their middle age (13), you probably already have a ""build"" in mind, a desired outcome you're beelining to - in the form of hammering the same handfuls of classes or extracurricular activities to pump cold and unfeeling stats & numbers up. As funny as it is to have a scrunkly faildaughter, the game doesn't react to it in any holistic or meaningful way - lower stats means fewer doors open to you.
Granted, it's not a soulless spreadsheet simulator or anything - it really is a lavish production filled with events that trigger according to certain milestones being hit, the problem for me is in how much it rewards a straightforward and narrowminded grind rather than making tough decisions, reacting to your own daughters autonomy and wishes.
And there's little else to it, really - the cast here are a little charming and it's heartwarming to watch your lilbabie fill her boots in the vocation of your choice; but when the artifice falls out from under me i realise i've spent days clicking the same buttons, watching the same animations, hoping to increase my chances where I get an ending screen akin to whatever da hell I wanted my daughter's job to be. Full possibility my brain is not wired for this kind of game, I just wish it felt more like parenthood and less like EV training.

There's a spark in here that promises more than it delivers but I want to nourish & nurture it until the debt is paid.
It really is a few adjustments away from something I'd luvv, but Exoprimal finds itself utterly lost at sea in an attempt to copy the other Games As A Service bigboys. Progressing the story and blossoming the enemy pool alongside a predetermined amount of matchmakes sounds fine in theory, but it essentially means that it takes about thirty sessions before the game graces you with the challenge and variety it so desperately needs in the early half. Even with my saintly patience I considered dropping it at multiple points, which is kind of a shame, the later boss battles are great fun! With more of a focus on co-op boss battles and the large scale PvE encounters it fitfully teases u with, there'd be something here. With this being a fully-fledged Capcom lunch & dinner, I had hopes in the leadup to release that there would be some Lost Planet 2 DNA in here, but alas!!!! Gone are the days of densely curated linear mission structures, matchmake and pray the randomly choreographed instance permits you a good time. Your moneys no good here we only accept dinobux. Ultimately I think I'm being kinder than I should because Exoprimal fell out of gamepass and it's fun on the most baseline level of human experience to hold left click and watch hitboxes disappear.

I think the most gutting thing is knowing that it's a GaaS title with "Content Coming Soon" which I can very safely and sagely forecast just means "we didn't receive enough battle pass subscriptions for season 1, & have decided to terminate service before we even get the chance to add content that really lets the strengths of the gameplay shine".
Annoying that they came so close but I liked what it offers!!!

Felt like revisiting an old childhood fav standalone Source mod!
Nightmare House 2 is very clearly inspired by F.E.A.R. Not by the genre-redefining gunplay, mind you; but by the practically infamous aniemic horror segments it insists on hitting you with. You’d think setting to focus your game around those segments would be a downright disaster - nobody sees those parts of F.E.A.R. as its hard sell, but Nightmare House 2 kind of adopts this jovial haunted house ride approach. It is so densely packed with spectacle. Unique, snappy little sequences and spooky flourishes around practically every corner, finding new ways to disarm the player with scares that are oftentimes hilariously blunt, and occasionally wildly forward-thinking (for 2010) or subtle. All the while, never resorting to audio jumpscares! God I kind of love it. Granted, it’s never scary in the genuinely affecting sense, but I am utterly endeared by its desperately eager-to-please sensibility of packing the short runtime to the gills with as much as it can get away with while maintaining a decent sense of pace.
This could be some element of nostalgia talking here, but I really do think that the modern-day torrential downpouring of self-serious and utterly miserable horror indies that blast through the Itch/Steam pipeline could learn a thing or two from what Nightmare House 2 has going for it. It will make you laugh & it will make you laugh & it will make u think.

Actually genuinely think this is incredible. Buying this completely blind, with all the DLC and gubbins was the sensation of having the most heavy game of all time airdropped directly onto me & flattening me like an Ed Edd n Eddy gag. Immediately evident in its years of careful tuning through content and quality of life updates on top of the sizeable season pass extra facilities and continents. Such a behemoth of moving parts would otherwise have felt mismatched, insurmountable and offputting were it not for the way these mechanics are eased and tutorialised through story context.
I had a session where I felt like building an airship for my fleet, and learned that I had to travel to the arctic, go on a perilous expedition to save a stranded soul, lost in the pale archipelago, carefully manage my campaign’s dwindling heat and health to best a gargantuan iceberg all to find a fucking Hydrogen vein I can transport halfway across the world. It keeps happening. I keep setting short term goals only for the floor to fall out from under me and suddenly I’m playing a completely different game. I’m terrified of what will happen to me if I open a restaurant for my capital.
Trust & believe in the sheer industrial might of Ubisoft Triple-A to cram a city builda to the gills with enough varied emergent content adorned by absolutely luscious sunkissed gouache presentation that I forget that I'm essentially doing admin. Tending to a blooming orchard of stacking intercontinental production lines, all the while receiving affectionate telegrams from a motherfucker actually named “Willie Wibblestock”. Entering first-person mode at key milestones in my nation’s development to see a downright adorable early 00’s PC game looking simulation of my beloved townsfolk livin their bestest lives I can afford them. It’s so nourishing yom yom 🥕🥦🌽💚💚💚😊.
feel the breeze on ur skin, it gives u +50% employee morale. feel the grass on ur bare feet - it has a City Attractiveness Bonus 🥰

'Pendulum Hold Your Colour Full Album Free Download [MP3 HQ]' changed their name to 'Windows XP Serial Number 034634-262024-171505-828316'

'Windows XP Serial Number 034634-262024-171505-828316' says: WwwwWwwwwasdaasdsadwwasdwwwassd

'Windows XP Serial Number 034634-262024-171505-828316' triple-rebound beheaded player: 'HD Ricochet Motorola Wallpapers'

'HD Ricochet Motorola Wallpapers' left the server.

'John Ricochet' says: hhow do i i turn off auto Aim>??

'Windows XP Serial Number 034634-262024-171505-828316' left the server - Timed out due to a client-side error

'John Ricochet' wins! 1st place of 1 players. 0 total Points

'John Ricochet' says: how d

Subway Surfing in the City of Glass.

The OG Mirror’s Edge is a bit of a darling to me - this laser-focused parkour action thrilla that limits it’s scope to densely choreographed sequences through rich, hyper-real urb environments. There’s a weightines to Faith’s movement, allowing the player to feel a sense of inertia to the stunts you string together, putting stones in your gut whenever your unbroken momentum ends in freefall. It’s so lean it’s so Mean.

Ultimately I put off playing Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst for yearz because I knew what they did to it. I knew it was an open world game, a sprawling map peppered with waypoints and collectables and challenges and skill trees and XP and shit. This Human Revolutionification of a game I originally adored because it sidestepped that stuff. With a few concessions (I skipped every cutscene and ignored everything that wasn’t a story mission), I was finally able to get over myself and just give the game a shot, and I’m happy 2 share that I think ME:C is Alright!!! It’s OK!

The shift in focus is almost immediately striking as the art direction of Catalyst shifts from heavily stylised minimal realism, to this catastrophic directionless mush of overexposed modernism. It's like every expensive yacht in the world crashed into one another to form a continent. It’s kind of pretty but it really doesn’t inspire awe in me in the same way as the OG… A lens flare fried calamity of white pointy buildings with an accent colour thrown in for good measure. Whenever I replay Mirror’s Edge, I gawk at the level of attention poured into the texture, staging and lighting work - and I just couldn’t find anything to care about here.

The reason for this visual mulch is, of course, gameplay clutter as a result of moving towards an open world. The environment design is stretched thin by taking a very blunt modular approach as a result of attempting to pad out the vast expanses of rooftop between quest markers. The City of Glass is slavishly built for Faith and her moveset, every canopy littered with pipes and platforms and grappling points with the intent to allow the player to maintain an unbroken sprint across vast expanses. I can’t help but prefer the simplicity and muted realism of the prior game’s world, one that felt almost hostile to the existence of the Runners, which necessitated a more thoughtful approach to the moment-to-moment - scanning the environment for ways to use your moveset to reach places you shouldn’t. Catalyst’s city is Faith’s playground - but who can deny the simple joys of swingin on da jungle gym.

I’m not going to shit on the game a whole lot - the core intent is very different, focused on player retention through endless sidemissions and jiggies, but it’s pretty great when you meet it halfway. Brushing aside the fluff content and focusing on the story missions allows something of a rush through what the game has to offer. It’s bigger, it’s crazier, it’s bombastic, Faith goes crazy scaling wacky luminescent architecture that doesn’t even pretend to feel like places built for civvies. Assault course game design. It even follows many of the same beats as the original game, you just can’t help but compare how differently things come across here. The combat buckles very quickly with miserable enemy variants, but I enjoyed the focus on using the environment against baddies by paddling them around/into each other, it's pretty slapstick but a damng lot more dynamic than what was in the original game.

I dunno, I’m middle of the road on this. Catalyst feels like the flipside of the same coin, Mirror’s Edge but hopped up on Ubisoft Juice. You couldn't convince me that Mirror's Edge needed bandit camps if your life depended on it, but the speed and flow and scale is intoxicating but it all rings kind of hollow when it feels like you’re just playing Aesthetique Temple Run. Maybe all I need to be happy in this life is seeing bullets go through Nvidia PhysX cloth & dats why this game isn’t doin it.

I have this propensity to never play games a second time, even the ones I love. It serves me well more often than not, because I greatly value backlog exploration and sheer variety over mechanical or scholarly mastery of any specific title. Where it bites me in the wahooey, however, is in largely skill-oriented titles like character action games, ones that demand keen attentiveness and willingness to retain and juggle knowledge of systems macro and micro. For as much as I love these games for their absolutely unbridled pomp and the hot-blooded verve that courses thru em - I know I’m not going to get the most out of them, I just don’t have that kind of attention. Bayonetta 1 is astoundingly good, but it’s a game I essentially Bronze Trophied my way through, and only watched .webms of people going sicko online for. I only knew what dodge offset WAS when I hit the last level, when it was too late for me 😔.
Bayorigins: Wily Beast and Weakest Creature is just a nice little scrimblo that forces a more steady pace with its longer runtime and focus on action adventure & metroidvania-lite elements. There is a more sensical focus on the storytelling here than in the mainline entries, exemplified through its presentation style of a children’s picturebook narrated by a granny. It’s all just nice, the visual direction is utterly astounding, and is the most blown away I’ve been by sheer artistry in a videogame in a very long time, the shader programmers were spinning in their chairs like the tasmanian devil on this one. With the combat being a touch more of a tertiary focus on the title than the rest, it allows itself time to slowly blossom through the course of the runtime with a steadily increasing amount of abilities, roadblocks and enemy gimmicks - and while there are no post-battle ranking screens to have Stone trophies nip at my heels, it felt immensely satisfying to sense myself mastering it under a more forgiving piecemeal delivery. It’s actually a little impressive how intuitive this control scheme becomes after an awkward starting period; forcing the player to control two separate characters by splitting the controller inputs down the middle. With its smart application within certain story beats, I became more than sold on the way this plays, kinda love it. For all these reasons, it's my favourite Bayonetta game. This is the warmest I’ve felt for a Platinum title since Wonderful 101, and while it doesn’t reach the same heights, it’s a miraculously good little spinoff to patch over my confidence in the studio that Bayo3 had dented.

Cleansed by the surf, a body washes ashore on a deserted beach. Nameless, this soul awakens, eyes gleaming with the will to live, and for all things worth living for.

This was my first full playthrough of the game since maybe 2013, and the first time I’ve tackled the expansion content added to the Dark Arisen release. Game still rocks my world. Something of a Capcom dream team coming together to create a moving Frazetta artwork. Hideaki Itsuno’s combat direction acumen and some Monhun crew in the wings to reign the madness into a more grounded dark fantasy action game with a keen eye for resource management & an iconique soundtrack. An excitable exploration of pure western fantasy through the Japanese lens akin to Record of Lodoss War.

I really do just think it’s special. Every excursion through the world or a dungeon is speckled with emergent Moments that can only come around because the systems the game is built on offer a wealth of synergies and expressive means of interactivity. The regularity with which Dragon’s Dogma punctuates an excursion with sick as hell moments that steal your breath, as well as pure slapstick comedy, it almost rivals a particularly haphazard TTRPG campaign. It pays to take note of enemy AI behaviors and exploits, because your pawns will learn as you do and take actions that repeatedly surprise - when I started picking throwing loose enemies into the wider horde in order to more easily deal AoE damage, I noticed my pawn starting to do it for me and I felt like a proud dad.

The world of Gransys is almost my platonic ideal open-world RPG setting. With transportation options limited, the relatively small scale of the map itself is made to feel gargantuan, aided by the density to which it is decorated with places of interest and rewards for clambering up suspicious nooks. Questing requires planning so careful that even a journey down a road must be approached with trepidation. All with thanks to the game’s downright brutal day-night cycle with realistic lighting, you enter a pitch black forest with only your lantern and the reflection of the starving beastly eyes peering at you through the shrubbery. It was impressive in 2012, and remains so to this very day imo!!! I’ll never ever in my life forget the way I shot out of my chair because I turned on my lantern in the pitch black, to reveal the face of a gargantuan chimera winding up a punch.

Dark Arisen offers a locale with something of a megadungeon populated by new enemies and threats. Some of the most fun I’ve ever had with the game occurred within those dingy stone walls. It feels almost like a Bloody Palace mode so you can unleash your classbuilding prowess on the increasingly monstrous beasties thrown your way. End boss was some pure “ah, so this is why games exist” affirmation, too.

…But, it’s undeniably as half-baked as the rest of the game itself. Dragon’s Dogma feels about as unfinished as I’d dejectedly expect anything that comes across as a double-A passion project to be. Brimming with brave creative flourishes, but lacking in a certain star power to really let it raise the bar. I don’t want to beat the dead horse and lament the concepts on the cutting room floor, but it’s fairly noticeable that the game suffers from an enemy and location variety deficit. The implementation of the Pawn system is downright amazing, but so peculiar with miniscule blink-and-you’ll-miss-it details that they don’t have much of a cohesive bigger picture place in the game, and come across as a patchwork solution to a botched multiplayer mode. The quests are fairly rote in and of themselves, and the characters - while I love their antiquated Tolkienist dialogue style, are all flat and unmemorable. Even the classes themselves, which I’d still say are near-enough goated as far as fantasy action games are concerned, could do with a little more in the way of skill diversity. Bitterblack Isle itself feels like at most five unique rooms repeated a handful of times.

Still, don’t wanna be a downer. Dragon’s Dogma is amazing, scratches such a specific itch that I can only thank The Maker that it even exists in the way it does at all. Didn't mention the story at all, not sure how I'd tackle it honestly - thematically rich and insanely well executed. Grigori gets me weak at the knees, man. How the fuck is this game getting a sequel, nothing I like is ever allowed to do that.

Data File-
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[#FORCED START OVERRIDE - - LOG OPENED]
BROADCAST: DSE Backloggd - - RA 18h 06m 0s | Feb 20th 2023

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“Never should have smoked that ҂ѼҎ҉֎ (excrement? physic?), now I’m in the Abyssal Scar.
I must admit to having been left gobsmacked and dumbfounded by how much Returnal has left such a strong impact on me. I don’t have much history with Housemarque’s library of games, despite Super Stardust HD being such a near-permanent fixture on my PS3 that it could have passed for my TV’s screensaver. Outland is relatively slept on these days too, I reckon, but ƺƻƛʥʭФѩ (unneeded digression?). Returnal finally received a PC port, allowing me to give the title a shot. The ᵬᶚỻӜѯ (electronic device?) is so deprived of games it’s genuinely heartbreaking…”
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“Typically I’d run for the hills whenever someone threatened me with a roguelite - a genre I often find ƛʥ؆ٱᵯᶈ (disinterest in?) at the best of times, and one that stands in stark opposition to what I personally find fulfilling about videogames at worst. There wasn’t much in place to prepare me for how deftly Housemarque utilised their core arena arcade design tenets around this Cronenberg/Villeneuve aesthetic pastiche with equal parts confidence and purpose. It must be said, because it is ﬗꬳꬲﭏ (true?), that this is the best-feeling third-person shooter I’ve touched. The degree of freedom of expression in the general character movement, as well as the broad utility of the tools available allow for some astoundingly gratifying excursions through arenas fraught with enemies spewing endless pointilist bullet patterns in easily analysable & counterable on the fly attack patterns.”
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“The compounding subtleties and delicate touches to the way Returnal’s roguelite structure was sculpted for purpose to encapsulate Selene’s purgatorial journey convinces me of this being one of the best character studies I’ve seen since maybe Silent Hill 2? Blurring the line between ﬕתּﻼἕ (symbol?), metaphor and physicality and never prescribing strict and demystifying literalisations. I think it is a very special thing when taking a moment to enjoy the environmental art design can yield subtle narrative realisations, lines drawn between the fragments of a character that they allow you to excavate. The world of Returnal is so dizzyingly all-encompassing.”
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[!!!!CONTENT WARNING: Topics of suicide!!!!!]
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“Rot13 Rneyvre va gur jrrx, V znqr na nggrzcg ng raqvat zl yvsr. Qvqa’g nppbzcyvfu zhpu orlbaq fbzr oehvfrf naq n srj qnlf fcrag va n orq va RE. Va gur zbzragf yrnqvat gb zr npgvat ba zl vqrngvbaf, vg sryg yvxr funeqf bs vpr jrer cvrepvat guebhtu rirel cneg bs zl obql - svyyvat zr jvgu n qrrc puvyy naq fgvyyarff, nyzbfg nffhevat zr gung vg’f bxnl, gurer’f ab funzr, V’ir nyernql orra qrnq. Jura V neevirq onpx ubzr, fgvyy n yvggyr qehax bss gur cnva naq funzr bs vg nyy, V qvqa’g xabj jung gb qb. Guvf ebbz qvqa’g srry yvxr zl bja nal zber. V qvqa’g erpbtavfr gur crefba va gur zveebe, gur crefba jub jebgr zl grkgf be zrffntrf. Yvfgyrff, V gubhtug abguvat bs pbagvahvat zl cynlguebhtu bs Ergheany, vg jnf whfg na rnfl cvrpr bs abeznypl V pbhyq fyvc onpx vagb.
Fryrar ernjbxr ba na nyvra cynarg jurer fur nyjnlf qvq, gur napube cbvag ng gur fvgr bs gur vavgvny nppvqrag. Fur znqr n pbzzrag ba ubj haerpbtavfnoyr gur raivebazrag jnf sebz ure ynfg yvsr, fur yvfgrarq gb nhqvb ybtf erpbeqrq ol urefrys naq rkcerffrf qvfthfg naq pbashfvba ng ubj guvf crefba pbhyq cbffvoyl or ure. Univat na nethzrag jvgu tubfgf naq ybfvat gb lbhe bja ibvpr, qrfcrengryl pynjvat sbe n yvtug ng gur raq bs gur ghaary bayl gb erirny gur znyvtanapvrf naq cnenfvgrf rngvat njnl ng lbhe bccbeghavgvrf sbe frys shysvyyzrag. Fghpx va n fvflcurna gevny sbe frys, sbetvirarff, ngbarzrag gung bsgra srryf qbjaevtug shgvyr.
V xabj nyy bs guvf fbhaqf evqvphybhfyl gevgr, ohg Ergheany fgehpx n areir jvgu fhpu cerpvfvba vg sryg nyzbfg vainfvir. Univat guvf yvggyr fvzhynpehz bs n wbhearl gb puvc njnl ng naq zrgnzbecubfr bagb zlfrys unf urycrq prager zr, svaq pbagrkg va gur abvfr naq pbashfvba, znqr zr srry yvxr V pna nvz gb or abezny ntnva. Znlor gur wbhearl V'z ba vf n shgvyr bar, gurer'f rirel cbffvovyvgl V'yy ybfr zl sbbgvat naq snyy gb gur onfr bs gur zbhagnva lrg ntnva - ohg orsber gura, V'yy fgevir sbe nppbzcyvfuzragf gung whfgvsl zl cynpr va guvf yvsrgvzr. V'yy fubj zl gunaxf gb gur crbcyr jub znxr yvsr n wbl. V'yy xvpx gur jbeyq va gur qvpx orpnhfr fcvgr pna or n cbjreshy zbgvingbe.”
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True enough, a game I wholeheartedly consider to be a watertight little marvel was graced with a sequel that promises bigger and better - and in their attempt to deliver, it begins to burst at the seams. There was a certain elegance to the way the Okomotive, the main mode of transport in FAR: Lone Sails, was designed. In the context clarity for which every function and dial coexists with the rest of the machine and how breezy it felt to dart around its internals. Much of that game’s appeal was in the ease with which you could Zombie Mode it, stringing together repeated steam release speed boosts while spinning all the other managerial plates thrown your way, all with enough spare time to enjoy the journey you’re making.

FAR: Changing Tides trades the Benz for the boat, with an interesting inversion of the previous title’s control scheme, and a very different internal routine you’ll have to learn and adapt to as an increasing amount of plates demand to be spinned. I’m all for a spot of intentioned friction in my games, but it felt as though I was struggling with the control scheme more often than the barge itself. Changing Tides’ doesn’t let you hold on to the momentum you build for very long before you need to grind to a halt, it’s a very harsh stop-and-start routine you have to rigidly follow. My main source of disappointment is in how I felt as though I stared at my vehicle’s gauges and switches for far longer than the stunning environments rolling by, bumping around its cramped internals and trying to nurture any semblance of speed I built. All of this is a thorn in the side of a game that deserves to be absorbed into. It pains me to hear a wonderful piece of background score coming to an end before I can reach the finale of a setpiece or chapter. There's a lot of strained silence in stretches of Changing Tides that smack less of Muted Immersion and more that I’m Fucking Up Somewhere. This kind of lack of clarity tends to extend to the puzzle the segments that break up the boat trips, I’m somewhat in disbelief at how often they’d place items or levers behind obstructing pieces of geometry.

Not without its flashes of brilliance, don’t get me wrong. When the going gets going, and you hit the supercharge, carving your ship through the cerulean nebula, I felt like I was driving a carmine dagger and dealing the killing blow to God. In a stunningly good final act, Changing Tides is genuinely host to one of the biggest sentimental sequel popoffs I’ve had since Shadow Moses in MGS4. I can forgive all matter of ooo clunkiness when a game makes me loudly exclaim “No Fucking Way”.

“Find a sacred square of earth. Lay down, so you have the dirt at your back. Close your eyes. Close everything. Your ancestors are in that dirt. All the living and all the dead are holding you up. Now Stand. They’re still there, aren’t they? It’s time to move. To entangle yourself everywhere with everyone. So that next time you lay down in the dirt, you will have so much more to tell them.”

As I’m sure many of us can, I recall the time we moved out from our childhood home - the rooms I spent my most formative years and the battle scars they earned through the hustle and bustle of young family life. I’m thinking of my bedroom; my wooden crew bed riddled with teeth marks and Cartoon Network stickers. The pale blue colour of the paint on the walls, frayed and cracked in the areas I gormlessly taped posters without my parents’ permission. The doodles I hid in the corners of the furniture their eyes couldn’t reach, depicting my aspirations for the future, the riches and gifts and moments I’d give to my dearest friends and family. It’s been a good twenty~or-so~ years since I last saw those remnants of my past, and I’m a little stunned in how Season allowed me to think back to them so vividly for the first time in nearly as long. Everything can tell a story, host a spirit of the past - miniscule but never completely insignificant. I wish I could see them again, I wish I had the foresight to have taken photographs or something.

Ultimately, this is what Season: A Letter To The Future is about, sculpting in time out of photographs, sketches and audio recordings. Preserving memories of the world as it stands before a vague concept of calamity threatens to change it. In its opening moments, your character Estelle and her mother are making a pendant to protect Estelle’s mind on the journey ahead. Doing so means Estelle’s mother has to give up five memories of her own. The courtyard where you’re asked to gather your first recordings is staged perfectly. Decorations from a party last night still hang in a tree, and signs of the village’s lived-in past are everywhere. A leisurely stroll to capture all I could of the gorgeous little village, rendered lovingly with painterly oranges and purples.

I couldn’t believe my luck, it’s an amazing start to the game. The establishment of melancholic urgency and the world being rich with cultures and theologies that beg to be preserved for future generations, and the understanding of how frail the mind really is… How eager it seems to omit and alter the past to safeguard ourselves from oversentimentality. Couldn’t have been more captivated. And as my bicycle crested the final stretch of the hilltop, I tip over the edge, letting go of the controller, letting gravity take over and pull me down the long and winding road ahead, I realise that the game is a little special.

Season’s secret weapon is in its journal mechanic - wherein the player can freely personalise the entries afforded to you with custom placements of polaroid photographs you’ve taken, as well as sketches, decals, flora and whatever else you find on your journey. There’s a decent amount of freedom of expression here allowing you to capture the essence of a location however best you see fit. The kicker is that you only have two pages per key location. It can often be all too tempting to just sweep through a videogame map and hoard every shiny collectible like a kinda crow, but imposed upon the journal is a limited framework per key locale that forces you to be mindful of the things you choose to omit. My mind was on hyperdrive during this early stretch of the game; viewfinding striking angles for my photographs and designing the best notebook pages I felt an area deserved, and deciding what records were of the most importance.

Sadly, this doesn’t last too long. Eventually you reach the open-world segment where most of the playtime is spent - Tieng Valley. While clearly a lovingly realised zone filled with historic locales and mindful touches, it introduces a monotonous feeling to its exploration as things become increasingly clear that the scope of the game falls too narrow to match what I was hoping for. This isn’t Kino’s Journey, it’s one episode of Kino’s journey stretched thin over a 5~6 hour playtime. It slows down in its variety of unique stimuli and begins to focus more keenly on the mystery of the sole opposition in the game and their goal of ushering forth the ‘end of the world’. That’s not necessarily a problem on its own, but neither the mystery nor the few remaining citizens of Tieng Valley are all that compelling. The people of the valley are traumatized by memories of past conflicts, and much of life there is centered around how to live with that trauma or forget it completely. Season settles into the most anodyne musings on memory and how people live with the past… the transience of memory and the collective ability to heal. The themes tackled are so broad, it’s hard to pick a message out of all the noise, and it truly doesn’t help that the delivery is so flat. Its focus on small human stories and creative expression is admirable, even as they’re drowned out by a lukewarm plot, and the world’s beauty can’t be overstated. But rather than the meditative, meandering journey its opening suggests, Season gets locked into a single story that centers on the cataclysmic fate approaching its world more than the wonder that already fills it.

I’m disappointed, ultimately, but it was a nice pilgrimage.