There’s a lot of charm in Thirsty Suitors; like many games that have bubbled up in the III 2020s game scene, Suitors combines a streamlined old hat form of gameplay with a degree of nuanced and unconventional, for the medium, storytelling that seeks to both direct audiences towards investigation of the mechanics which we see has, at this point, having no real origin or persuasion of consequence as well as to investigate the storytelling potential of these mechanics which were previously associated with the water-sealing of narrative via a gamified rhythm: instead of simplifying a eventage down to systematised components which abstractions, many of these indie games abstract the narrative via the mechanical persuasion which is the accepted grammar of the medium. Less now are we to see the turn based combat of Cloud and Barret as stand in for a quick and scattered skirmish, and more we see Jala and Andile performing that calculus in their minds, when during a fight with an intimate, that will most calculatedly burn the person they are opposite to in the conflict.

I think that’s what Thirsty Suitors is trying to accomplish. The cataloguing of emotional lashing out is there in the turn based combat, skateboarding’s reinterpretation of town architecture away from its traversal by spheres of adults who could not possibly grasp your higher ordered comprehension of spaces and uses (much like a cult’s layered cognizance of societal order, at least so goes the cult narrative with Soundie and his acolytes), the cooking as purely a confidence game which is nitpicked for process instead of product. These all seem to gel to the various narrative sectors which Thirsty Suitors puts forward. Much like in the desperation gambling of Citizen Sleeper or the rearrangement of narrative moralia by mere placement of component parts within Storyteller, I respect the investigation of stories unfamiliar to games with mechanics which seem well trod at this point. It’s a necessary act in how games and their developers come to actualising the art in more holistic ways.

However, the play of these new grammar-mechanical investigations in Suitors is just so tedious and turgid. The combat is simplistic and rote, the skateboarding is unexpressive and cumbersome, the cooking is useless to the game item economy and overlong for the pay out. Every moment of sitting with the game’s characters is cheapened by sidling them into mechanical expressions which simplify their agency into horrible fetch quests conveyed from mote to mote by ‘knock off Antonio Eagle’s Amateur Skater on mobile’ level traversal, traversal which culminates in repetitive and reductive combat with characters who are not lent any illumination by the interplay of the caustic conflict at the heart of Suitors central mechanical metaphor. I’m no fan of Undertale, but for a game to come this long after that game’s elegant solution to turn based empathy and still fail in this regard is shocking.

I adore the representation of trans and queer characters here, and I love that there’s basically not a white person in this PNW American town. But I also find it a bit insulting that to find this representation, representation which legitimately treats the experiences had by POC and queer people as fundamentally different than their counterparts (looking at you, every CRPG ever), gamers of this demographic are constantly roped into games which simplify mechanics unto nothing demanding rigour, either in skill or consequence, requiring no actual engagement beyond pushing buttons as if the simulation was a child’s speak and spell.

This review contains spoilers

Even though this review is already marked as containing spoilers, I want to make as clear as can be made clear that if you are at all interested in horror games, the ways mechanics intervene on mood and theme (particularly as direct input verbs, not context sensitive perversions of character ability), the afflictions of anxiety and isolation on our hyper-current age, or in how adventure game puzzle design could potentially progress in directions that are contiguous with old Lucas games but are not coded in their makeup as jokes, then play Homebody before reading any further. It is my GOTY so far, and more than any game I’ve played this year, it benefits from a complete naivete of any of the component parts making up the game. I was amazed at how touching and nuanced the game managed to be at progressive stages, angling from many different vantage points a direct line into the heart of its arguments, especially considering that it’s the second game from the Game Grumps; the quality of this game has changed my position on wanting to play any games from this studio to ‘because they made it’ from ‘despite that they made it’ in 6 hours of profoundly meaningful art. Please play Homebody.

Okay, where to begin? Because of how the game presents itself, being another in what may be the renaissance of PSX nostalgia or the pit of indie stagnation depending on your viewpoint (I love this graphical starting point for the record - I think the high fidelity rendering of ‘life-like’ models being pumped out right now marks the lowest valley of aesthetic norms or movement in the medium since the pre-NES era), the most immediate draw, or repellant, within the game is likely the visual style: depending on how invested you are in the revitalisation of low-poly environments and character models, the gorgeousness of Homebody’s aesthetic could be enough to compel you to play it on its own. While last year’s PSX horror darling, Signalis, hewed more closely to the grainy call sign of Silent Hill, drawing similarly on that game series’ greater penchant for expanding the scope of the horror in both a maximalist approach for game world density and a obscuration of the shape of the horror environment, rendering many of its threats in blur, shadow, and fog to foment an unknowability that buds into a madness of incomplete understanding, Homebody is much more aggressively skewed towards the early RE side of things: a more compact arena that demands returning endlessly to the same corridors of horror that you know to contain that which can very easily kill you, which will do so with complete actualisation, and which offers no possible escape to the safety of the unknown. Like in RE1, you are confined in a mansion that endlessly expands but never lets up its envelopment; the further you are able to probe away from the centre of your peril, the more you realise how isolated you are. This is the first place where the PSX style of design helps in lending thematic poignancy - the more generalised style of rendering, wherein something like a cardboard box, due to the limitations of possible complexity in creating the model, represents a platonic ideal, or something nearer to that ideal, than something which, by dint of characteristics like dents, marker, shipping labels, etc., has a greater degree of specific, and thus empathic, but not embodied, adornment to the scenario at play. By placing the player within a simulation of possible expression towards the average, when that average is skewed, the player has had the opportunity to invest themselves personally on, and appositionally to, the behalf of their being ingratiated to the player character. Similarly, the PSX low poly rendering lends a degree of unknowability in congress with the investment it engenders; the load which that can be anything to bear comfort can similarly be invested with discord and surreality by a simpler rearrangement of the surrounding contexts, becoming something which was the player’s tether to a reality which housed them and fostered them to a noose which repels and devours them. The excitement/volatility of simplistic and more iterable models allow for an ebb and flow of the gestalt presence that the game world entire takes on in Homebody: wherein a highly realised, in detail and description, world like that in RE4R can there be present anchors which are immediately tied to the place as it is and will be for the runtime of the game, it cannot as easily shift any in-game representation in a mirrored or perpendicular meaning. In Homebody, the fixtures of lights, the position of vases, the contents of bowls can all be manipulated and perverted along a broader axis of tonal affliction because of the broadness and generic qualities of their representation, which when manipulated by the volatile and horrific nature of the game as a surreal journey, are in turn invested with a personal veracity, not a pictorial trust.

And so then, what are these themes that are causing waves of return and away transgressions embedded in mundane household objects? There are a lot, surprisingly not in a sequence that might be expected if you were to map out the emotional intensity that each presents when typically seen in other media or in games, if these themes are ever represented in games at all: 21st Century entropy in adult friendships, existential guilt, the body as a unit of time outside our control, millennial’s arrested development as economic prospect, jealousy as a polished instrument, and more. Each are treated in their turn not as a series of escalating difficulties which our PC, Emily, is saddled with as her tribulations mount to greater show later triumphs, but are blows which one nurses in the state of belief that the pain we hold belongs in the body; each is not a product of actions or an unfairness dealt, but a return to the mean. For example: as Emily tours through the house time after time, the dialogue her friends have for her graduate from the slyly accusatory with a metre of forgiveness to varieties of carceral and caustic, glinting in accord with the the increasing violence that has occurred physically across the house, but also across the memories we are shown in flashback and reinhabitation. In Majora’s Mask, the perversion of the town as doom eternally comes is an excellent suffusion of mood to the game, but in Homebody, not only is the mood deepened with these changing knowns, but also the texture with which our understanding of Emily as a character inhabited by us, who, without spoiling anything, is strung along in many more ways than simply by a joy-con.

If you’ve read this far without playing the game, you probably don’t intend to or feel the need to dodge the spoilers, but I’ll give one more warning, because what I’m about to go into is the intercession of mechanical theme that really put my heart in my throat. If I’d known it was coming, I would have been sorely robbed of a wonderful experience.

Dialogue, and to a lesser extent, in-game prose, are often the bulk, or entire, carriages that run the weight and density of thematic fulfilment in games which attempt some kind of excursion of meaning beyond mechanical exercise (this is true to such a degree that critics will often assign about as much time discussing theme in reviews as is proportionate to the talkiness of games: Into the Breach gets reviews which are 90% mechanical critique, Torment gets reviews which are 90% thematic critique). While many games create useful metaphors out of play, such as this year’s Sludge Life 2 or the real kings of mainstream metaphorical mechanics, Silent Hills 1-3, many which go for a degree of weight in their “point” have either realised or conditioned to accept that the transliteration of theme to mechanics will merely be disentangled and translated back upon critical play; it is often the assumption that architecture, play, and design will bear the brunt of tone, whereas writing and narrative design will carry the core thrusts of theme. Homebody is no real renegade from this formula. Its mechanics are pretty thoroughly Resident Evil meets LucasArts, and when not playing revamped Towers of Hanoi, Emily is typically in conversation. They are not ‘usually’ carriers for potent discussions of the themes laid out above (although they are marvellous red herrings for them). But, the twist of this dialogue is not that it merely says things on the themes above, but it does things with them as well. When chosen dialogue in conversations is switched out for varying degrees of nonchalance, deflection, or obscuration, Homebody is commenting doubly on Emily as a character, as well as allowing Emily both a perverse form of quantum agency: she is ‘choosing’ her words and receiving characterisation from the player, rebutting that control by being an enigma outside of the player who will not merely say what we choose, and disallowed of that choice by the antagonism of the game. She, when externalising nothing through these brush offs, is showing with telling, making as clear in the game as she can her interpretation of the events and how they emotionally affect her, but is suffering from the most common anxiety I know amongst people my age: she can’t say what she means, literally. Not only does this quasi realisation of Emily become a complex and bubbling uncertainty, but it applies exponentially outward to the house in all its tabula rasa PSX glory: the plainness of texts refuted and contorted does a similar trick of unreality that Control does with its theming toward objects of power in how they lodestone iconography with cultural subconsciousness. Emily is not allowed to say what she needs to, instead being a platonic “Emily” - what if a fruit bowl could not be what it needs to be, instead eternally presenting as the platonic “fruit bowl”. This is the major horror in Homebody. This is how the culmination of its influences congregate on the work as a total completeness. The unassuming nature of the adventure game style puzzles take this quality on; the music as a contextual undercurrent takes this quality on; the undressing of the house as set and its characters as housesitters takes this quality on: it is a game that languishes in the un of everything which is normally itself - a being in self negation that can only relay meaning through what it is, yet seemingly is not.

My only quibbles with the game are those likely born from budgetary issues: the AI of the homunculus is quite simplistic and easily broken, which turns the death it leers at you from a thing which terrors to one which moves the game forward (as dying is actually a wonderful thing for showing the next artful and morose interlude in the narrative). It will often stupidly loiter when not given a clear and immediate objective, turning the game occasionally into a queue of getting somewhere you already are. Similarly, depending on how often you have died throughout the game, the interludes can begin to repeat at the last mark in the game. This is disappointing because it's the full thematic peak as well as the peak of tension; the repetition of elements shows a bit more gaminess than is desired when it feels like everything else is organically crashing down on you. For a real minor nitpick, whenever you transition screens, your forward direction resets to a new alignment with the surrounding and you’ll often turn right back down into the corridor or room you’ve left from. It’s not awful, but a very minor annoyance that is constant.

Good game!

An improvement in every area that the first game was weak in with only a few setbacks concerning the first game's strengths. Traversal has been expanded upon as well as ironed out, broadening the possible range of the platforming challenges that provide a quick and diverting compliment to the moderately sped up combat. Whereas in Blasphemous 1, platforming segments were not just monotonous and tedious to get through on a mechanical level, but they didn't toe the absolutely necessary line of 2D level design abstraction with worldly richness and sense of place. Most areas were navigable in a similar way, and that way was nearly always slightly aggravating and boring. In the sequel, areas have a more noticeable differentiation in architecture and transgressions of ingress, making for a varied and localisable pronouncement of site. With this, the finely tuned motorics of The Penitent One is complimented by a better expanded metroidvania toolset, creating more axes of incursion between the available elements of play; whereas in the first game, fight and flight were pretty grossly bisected, Blasphemous 2 anchors its platforming challenges in the tools honed with combat. While double jump, dash, and "grapple" (Metroid grapple i.e. only at specific point, but here with rings to grab onto) are all present, the major tools for both major gameplay modes, platforming and combat, are set within the weapons. With each of the 3 melee weapons, the player is given a new tool to experiment on many of the points of interaction within Blasphemous II's many varied systems: the rpg-lite progression paths born from each weapon elicits many interesting variations of play possibility, the traversal is more obviously built with the frictionless joy of metroidvania shuttle-running, and the combat sings with ebbs and flows that were not possible in the much simpler system of the first game.

Some minor regressions in terms of enemy design, many of which are carried over from the first game, and quest design, which, while archaic and obtuse in the first game, is dumbed down for a more simplistic collect-a-thon type of mode. The enemy that are carried over from the first game maintain the care of animation and attack variety, whereas the new enemies, while still deployed in interesting combat encounters throughout the entire experience, are less interesting to fight and to watch die (the first game got by with an incredible charm of gore: each enemy exploding in an ironic display of highly unique hubris when reposted). The dreamy and uncanny unknowability of ancient religion is also lost in the streamlined and gameified approach: I felt more at home in Blasphemous II, which kind of took away from the sublime terror and discomfort of the first game's religious theme. Religion in Blasphemous II is part of interesting world building, but it has less to be said about it when the second go around has finished - I feel about this messiah about as much as I do when thinking of Pantagruel: a far cry from the discomfort at sitting on Golgotha with Blasphemous I.

Overall, Blasphemous II improves over the first game, and is a better entry point for the games if you missed the first one in 2019. Going back to 1 from 2 would be difficult after the mechanical improvements, but so is reading Deuteronomy after the Gospels. There is a reason that the NLT is more popular than the KJV now.

"Achievement: Lost Virginity!"

I tend to not be into games specifically which bake into their outflowing charisma the aura of lovable idiosyncrasy; I can get behind movies with casts of oddballs and quirks, novels populated with surreality at home, comics askew with half remembered figments of characters, but games which can’t make a pure sentimental or quizzical experience of life as we see it caricatured, but also a mechanical coinciding parallel argument, more often than not ape the artificiality these idiosyncratic works try to point out in our everyday social mores. Because something like The 20th Century (2019) is largely spectacular, able to be interacted with as the farce of a dream that compounds into what he revere as history, it cuts through the rote activities that go into creating that spectacle not in contrast to our normalcies that it thumbs at, but because our social construct allows for intra-commentorial reinforcements of its own multiplicity (which is part of why true critique is so hard to maintain without becoming the obsequient second comer to the argument between status quo and mirrored parody). However, when games pronounce this mummery of displaced normalcy, artificialising the pretence of coordinated nature outcropped in our actions, it also must be coupled with the standardised explorative apparatus to function as that critique: dual sticks to transgress, A to interact, upgrades to signify achievements of the necessary progression. Due to this coupling of the obvious interaction model, because, except for the most radical of the avant-garde, there is also rote interaction along the borders of other art objects but in less conscious ways as holding a controller or managing inventories, the inclusive critique of normalcy (by which I mean anything other than a standardised reproduction of the conditions made up for requiring “normal life”) is more thoroughly adopted into the landscape of structural expression bent toward hegemony than is otherwise seen in things such as Dadaist poetry or free jazz.

That said, 24 Killers doesn’t fall into the Undertale ‘it is what it says it isn’t’ trap of these types of games, if only because it doesn’t set out as being so apart with as grand ambitions. It’s a modest game, if you don’t go for the truly bonkers total completion, that attempts to tell an unusual story of a parodic community, but it speaks less to the idea of community than it might if it were to flesh out more towards a true simulation. In most respects, it isn’t an anti-game or a subversive RPG or an adventure game about adventure games; it’s merely a little parable of why community is so regulated and normalised instead of how community is regulated and normalised: because people are pleasant and nice and it feels good to be pleasant and nice. It may be tedious to help a friend, but you do and then you have a coffee and sharpen their beak with a shell given to you by a gigantic fish that lives in a toxic sewer beside a living pile of shit.

Not much to say about the second go around the pike. Gunfire Games fleshed out the strengths of their first game: the excellent differentiation between enemy types and the possibilities of their dispatch across arsenals, the sense of mood in each various environment, the ease with which play sessions begin and end by divvying up chunks of game with dungeons designed across many different axes of mechanical possibility, the teasing of 'oh that could be a really cool build' in the many different possibilities of player enterprise - all of these are largely improved and expanded upon to the benefit of the game. However, everything that hampered the design of the first game is magnified and blown up in the exact same proportion as the first because all of the failures of the first are directly tied to the successes. The complete anonymity of combat design is necessary for making replayability a factor; the breadth of archetypal builds denies any serious investment in the possibility of caring about your PC; the mood of the game is fleshed out with some of the most inane and extraneous exposition I've encountered in years; the 'that could work with a cool build' - ness of the loot tables makes much of the exploration worthless, and what's more, near impossible to flesh out accordingly to your playthrough as necessary items may not drop or be able to be found in your iteration of the world.

Ultimately, it's better and worse than the first game. If it were less of a systems task, and less self serious, it would be a fun game to pop in and out of, but it's a bit too much of a capital G game to fulfill that purpose for me.

Didn't finish, refunded after an hour. As a product, it's so unpolished and lacklustre in every moment of gameplay that I'm amazed DreadX felt comfortable attaching their name to it; the UI is stodgy and waded through like slime, the movement is both weirdly blocky and too smooth at different parts, your basic verbset has no interaction with the world in a way that confirms place (your wrench makes no impact sounds or sprite effects when colliding with anything other than a puppet, which themselves have no ability to model actual damage on their bodies) in so profound a way that an early "puzzle" is plainly just a target beyond a waist high wall - literally you shoot it once, and it doesn't move nor is it hidden, and you get a key for it. You can't finish the puzzle until you get a gun though, because there is no jump, crouch, or sprint in MFN. For a game that tries to inflect tension, I cannot stress how important the player being able to reflect that tension back through character actions such as running away, hiding, and dodging obstacles. It is literally the most 101 level design for horror I can think of. Not to mention that the puppets have no attack animations, and since you can't sneak up on them, they will turn 180 degrees instantly to grab you, starting nearly every combat with guaranteed damage. It's infuriating and embarrassing. Also the wrench has an extremely distended hit box for some reason? Like, you can hit things that are 4-5 character strides in front of you. Speaking from experience, this is the sort of thing that would get mentioned in basically any initial round of QA, and would routinely be brought up because of how bad it feels to interact with the world on this most basic level; this most basic level being the ground upon which all interaction in MFN is built upon: it is a house of cards - probably cheap garbage cards like Minnesota Wild hockey cards.

As a piece of art, it's credentials of having a heart are not in question, but it is devoid of brains, spine, or muscle. The barks from the puppets are first draft at best; the dialogue is terribly written, directed, and performed from a place of completely inadequate motivation or sense of place; the art is blatantly ripped off, and worse still, homogenised, Prey Art Deco with all the charm shorn completely clear, and the structure of the first hour are a cowardly mix of early Resident Evil and Bioshock, combining the two for namechecked credibility without regard to how they mix. The overall effect of playing through the initial bit I did is that the devs have shallow taste that begins and ends at the most basic layers of gaming, referenced from the most obvious examples of gaming 'greats', thinking that what works in isolation will work broadly. This in combination with the profoundly old and stale idea of "puppets that aren't actually nice" and grafting it onto their freshman level ability to conceive of games is about as commendable as that Melissa McCarthy movie about muppets that fuck and swear. It's not great company.

Despite the fact that System Shock 2 is probably my favourite FPS (dogshit ending and all), I’d never made a real concerted effort to go back and play the game that preceded it. I knew that much of what was to become become solidified in 0451 games originated in System Shock, but by the time I first encountered those elements in Bioshock, much of that piquantness had been watered down to a highly palatable bitterness, necessary for tent-pole games that hit several consoles simultaneously, from the highly acquired flavour of PC jank, when being able to play console or PC really meant a lot, of the Shock name-makers. Even going back and playing System Shock 2 a decade ago required one session of bouncing off and readjusting my expectations appropriately. So despite the immensely rewarding sense of place and possibility offered on that cold and hostile station, when I saw that what laid the track to get there was more archaic, more artifacted, more mystifying, and more unforthcoming, I thought that I could just play Dishonored instead.

When the remake for System Shock was announced though, I figured I could get the context without the homework; I would be able to cruise through The Citadel as The Hacker as easily as Alpha and Delta could through Rapture. NOPE! System Shock is a remake of the 1994, but it has not been remade. The environments are wonderfully updated without a beautiful voxel fidelity that feels foreign and tactile and industrial, and the interface is snappy and easy to navigate with the solidified 30 years of reinforced key-mapping schema and necessity - but, the design? The encounters? The puzzles? That’s all 1994 vintage, baby. At pretty regular intervals, I would do something by accident and wonder, “Jesus, they didn’t tutorialise that?” Nightdive made the call in their updating that Looking Glass’s original ideas still held water, irradiated though it might be, and that their job was to allow a new generation to see it, nothing more. And I think they were pretty spot on with this approach: the parts of System Shock 2 that are truly great, the level design, the environmental storytelling, the incidental characterisation, the unique and strangeness of how the game asks you to interact with it; that’s all here pretty much as fully formed as it was in System Shock 2. Maybe more so, if just because the face lift (and complete counter-intuitiveness to modern sensibilities in AAA shooters) allow for what was great about BOTH System Shock games to come through as clearly as it ever has been able to.

That said, the 90s ImSim jank is still pretty gritty, and your tolerance for slowly locomoting (with a pretty pitiful stamina reserve) through massive levels with barely any idea of which surface of The Citadel’s, like, 10 different spinning plates is about to serve you a big ol pile of Akira flesh is going to dictate how much of the game compels you. The combat, despite gluing me to the mouse and keyboard with high impact tension - each bullet smashing through me with the impact of most game’s artillery class weapons - is flatly complex, with a huge amount of lateral possibilities, but not much ability to upwardly advance in tactics. You can tell when peeking in and out of corners, taking your three shots and then waiting for the enemy to take theirs, that DOOM had come out only 10 months earlier than the original Shock, and was pretty much the only game in town for really interesting shooting. The guns in System Shock (2023) feel great, and they look amazing as models, but taking the Scorpion or the Railgun into combat won’t change your tactics: you'll be looting ammo and shooting that ammo, but that's about as complex as the gunplay can get. Also sorely missing from System Shock 2 is the progression path allowed (being that this system was innovated into the 0451 genre with that sequel so I understand it not being here, but, you know), making exploration a more exciting and integrated possibility than in either the original or the remake. Getting guns that pack more of a punch - and gadgets that drain your energy faster than should be legal for how useful they ultimately end up being - is not enough to curve the difficulty up the way they do; the game starts off far too easy, and it ends with demanding some pretty reprehensible quicksave tactics being necessary to save yourself from having to constantly hoof it back to the nearest floor with a decked out med chamber. The ultimately pretty static state of The Hacker removes a great deal of replayability, and I’d imagine that on a second go, knowing how little you need to scrounge up to get to the highest state of mechanical proficiency, it would be pretty easy to cut the playtime of the first go through of The Citadel into 1/4th of the initial time.

All that said: wow, they really did place a lot of emphasis across so many more nodes of play possibility back in the day, didn’t they? Obviously as fidelity has become of preeminent importance for roping in gen pop, the design teams of games have shrunk their respective share of modern developers - to get someone who only plays 2-3 AAA games a year, you kind of need them to feel generally warm about everything in front of them. But Nightdive got off pretty sweet without making that deal with the devil: the design was right there, it can all be technical personnel for the remake if that’s what they want. I think Looking Glass would be proud as heck if they made this game - and whoops! They did.

Scourgebringer approaches game design with a scrupulous, or maybe an agnostic puritanism, distaste for elements that are non-combinatronic or against stream in their play matching. The entirety of the skill tree, navigated in the 20 second intervals taken between the game’s 10 minute runs, consists of quilting together elements, which already had interaction across several matrices, further and further into tighter and tighter knit. By the time Scourgebringer runs extend consistently into the final area, extending the initial dives of 2 minutes dashes to 15 minute sprints, every action, every element of the playspace, will engage the player with a mechanical statement that has another verb parenthetically communicated within it: your double jump keeps you off the ground, extending your ‘don’t touch the floor’ damage bonus for the room, which resets your dash, which has within it a smash reflection, which kills an enemy, increasing a different ‘enemies killed within getting hit’ damage bonus, which resets smash, jump, and dash in one button press. It is airtight; it is suffocating; it becomes very boring.

I don’t know exactly how the style of roguelike design became cemented as a map traversed by subsections of pre-laid out rooms, but I always assume that, even if there were games that used the formula previous to, Isaac is the game which any game made after Edmund McMillen’s maximalist manifesto takes as doctrine. There are variations: Gungeon’s “rooms” are environmental more elastic and rely on engagement with enemy patterns more than enemy placement; Nuclear Throne’s connective environment massiveness (comparatively) creates a truncated ebb and flow loop similar to something like Counter Strike’s shoot first or get fucked; Rogue Legacy designed for training exhaustion, trying to create a backdrop for swings of luck and disappointment, which could be denuded by good or bad play, but which really were meant highlight the more concrete elements of class, skills, and equipment - showing the variety the player could have at their disposal instead of what variety of minimally intelligent monster the game could muster. Isaac has such a wide centre that design elements from all three of the games just mentioned, and many more, are contained in some germ within its massive corridors of content, but similarly, all three above take the germ therein to raise and ripen. Scourgebringer, on the other hand, decided that the proper course of action was not to witness the fruit of further growth stifled by so much undergrowth but to prune away everything with thorns, scent, and colour into new shape. It is very manicured, and it looks interesting when driving by, but like any apple tree cut to appear like a dinosaur head, you can’t really enjoy what it’s meant to be with what it is. For every idea that Isaac has had which doesn’t figure in to every run at nearly every moment, Scourgebringer has eradicated it and shorn up the space which held it.

The most frustrating part of looking at how Isaac has been influential is that it seems most designers have some degree of criticism regarding its ‘messiness’. Seemingly, the idea of coins becoming useless later on, hearts being a pointless drop for half the characters, keys having an upper limit use case of about 4 for 95% of runs, and maybe a 10:1 ratio of items which actually excite an idea of playing post their acquisition, is something which designer’s don’t look kindly at. What, you don’t want to overfill your game to bursting over the course of 10 years? For essentially free? I get it - Isaac is unruly, and Edmund McMillen is not the most disciplined designer. Taking the most fun aspect of the most fun run possible in Isaac is a great pitch for branching off from the blueprint; leave out all the times you got a range up from the Bloat, and make it so The Forgotten can smack all projectiles back at the enemies while dashing through them with Dark Arts.

Look! I just designed every Scourgebringer run.

That’s the problem with trying to make a purely antiseptic roguelike: the messiness of the play, which ultimately is the basis of all roguelike games in the action vein, given that you sacrifice with the genre’s any emotional concreteness from encounter design within a significant architectural world, profundity of economy to character state, or explication of cosmology from item placement, is the pantry of the game, not the recipe. Isaac’s vast surplus of mechanics is not a gooey pot of negative mixtures which counteract the flavour they bring - they are the possible spices which can be added to enhance each other, often bringing out flavours and potentialities unrealisable without experimentation. Scourgebringer plays like it's the favourite food of someone who only like chicken nuggets, like it is for someone who only can consume one small and safe idea that cannot come into contact with anything challenging to the palate without tantrum.

This is baked into every facet of play: the room layouts are variations of surface to emphasise wall running without actually compromising the ability to wall run; the enemies are all variations of bullet hell enemies that emphasise tight dodging and parrying without actually offering any difference in possible strategic play; the items are all tightly engaged with the highly integrated mechanical verbset but they change the verbset not at all, essentially negating any use other than to bookmark the fact that you’ve been playing for X minutes.

Of course, to use the food analogy, chicken nuggets are tasty (or in my case, tofu nuggets). They are cheap, and they are easy to eat, and mostly everyone likes them at some time or another. So is Scourgebringer bad? Maybe it's bad for you? At least if it’s all you eat, but McDonalds doesn’t sell them because they're trying to create food art. Nuggets are for when you either are on the road to something more substantial and worthwhile, maybe on the highway from Pentiment to Skin Deep (plllllleeeeease release this year). If that’s the case, then enjoy a bit of deep fried hack n slash. But if nuggets are one’s entire diet? You might look a bit sweaty.

I’m trying to make as concerted an effort as I can to playing games that are coming out or have come out in 2023, at least for the rest of 2023, so as to ideally engender an understanding less of the history of problems and proposed solutions to problems which have come and gone in the medium, which was a component part of my desire to go back and play historically, and instead try to see what problems are cropping up and which are being solved in modern games. Sometimes these problems are very ‘discourse-y’ things which have think-pieces written about them quarterly - skinner box design, representational and misrepresentational games casts, monetisation villainy - and sometimes the issues are personally developed, cropped, and curated by individual writers and designers. Think something like Bennett Foddy’s monologue in Getting Over It on the idea of art and asset design coinciding with how they interact with both aesthetic and mechanical purposes, or often cross purposes:

“For years now, people have been predicting that games would soon be made out of pre-fabricated objects; bought in a store and assembled into a world, and for the most part that hasn’t happened, because the objects in the stores are trash. I don’t mean that they look bad, or that they’re badly made- although a lot of them are- I mean they’re trash in the way that food becomes trash as soon as you put it in the sink. Things are made to be consumed and used in a certain context, and once the moment is gone they transform into garbage. In the context of technology, those moments pass by in seconds.”

Or something like Anthony Zonaga and Marcus Carter’s observation that architecture and opportunity, devoid of implicit character interaction when antiseptically viewed, will shape how the idea of character interaction should be approached. On Dishonored’s use of this, they say:

“Where world-building is successful, game architecture will be an embodiment of the morals and values of the fictional people who inhabit it…Architecture in Dishonored works to shape the player’s ethical agency through their interactions and observations in Dunwall by providing motivation (or deterrence, depending on their moral code) to redeem the city and save the lives of the citizens of Dunwall.”

When looking at these miniature brands of concern, these observational ideas and objects which players (and designers, to a certain extent) can blankly transmute into wireframe without consciously sanding a game’s texture in the process, we can attempt to surmise what the gestating seeds of future problems in our modern environment may become in 10 years (such as how precise landing has remained a problem in 3D platformers since Mario 64 became the template for the genre instead of Jumping Flash, when, at the time, the focus was on level design and transmuted iconography) or bloom out seedlings that will ensnarl a cult like progression path that is commercially poison but which flowers into entire streams of indie design that in their turn and mulling find the next important step in the medium’s evolution.

To narrow the scope to Sludge Life, I think Terri Vellman is a game designer who is highly engaged with Foddy’s perception of what does and does not transmute component elements of games into trash as well as Dishonored’s morality in play by way of rooftops, windows, and apartment sizes. In Sludge Life and Sludge Life 2, there are no sites on the maps which are transitory or refutational to the central theses at work in the series, but there are also no boxes of immense and concentric meaning, no rooms or corridors which reveal the premise of the game - no Andrew Ryan’s Office or Virmire or Mountain Top Mom Phone Call. The use of the space is thematically pregnant, which in the eyes of the game is an ironic nullity because of the intense sense of refuse that pervades both games, and by cohering and relating to each other in intense ways that refuse to be backdropped (a refusal which is aided by how relatively mechanics light both SL games are - the tagging really is just a way of putting objective markers to locomote to without creating the overwhelming sense of gaminess that those things appear as in Fallout 4 or The Witcher 3.) Vellman creates an atmosphere about garbage that never becomes garbage. Relating all these things together with an intercommunal expression of the mood Sludge Life presents uncompromisingly I found that I felt less like I was playing a walking sim, or comedy game or whatever it might more on its face look like, and more like I was playing an immersive sim; for all we attribute our Deus Exes and Thiefs the slate name of ImSim because of the mechanical communication that exists between their systems, the real flag for me is how the world interacts and encounters the player. Of course being able to mine hop to the top of the Statue of Liberty is a great sign of what the game is as well, Deus Ex felt like an immersive sim to me not because of how you variably ascend its world and more because the world had incidence upon every route from its areas that all had interesting intercommunal expressions about the transcended nodes taken or not. Sludge Life similarly will express to the player, architecturally, the idea of being and having been just the same, if on a much smaller and less ambitious scale.

The ethos of Vellman’s aesthetic has not always been as sharpened as it is in Sludge Life and particularly Sludge Life 2. Heavy Bullets and High Hell both have the vibrancy and tone, but lack the intensity and pointedness with which the punk reference moves beyond the cool factor and reflexive cropping up. Sludge Life is the steering of Terri V’s irreverent scatalogy away from how Sade’s perverse anti-morality concerning the bodily transgression has predominated anything higher brow than Farrelly since the French Revolution, instead seeing shit, piss, vomit, and broken bones transform into a visible mass ego death born from succumbing to the sensuous distance we place between the giving into being containers of waste of human byproduct and our self conceptions of humans apart from our evacuating such. Sludge Life baulks at the idea of society as one beating heart, instead looking at the upper class as a massive set of lungs chain smoking, and the lower class as a irascible set of bowels endlessly being turned out. Humour and commentary are interweaved not by threads intricately gathered but by pugilistic transferences of sweat and blood - the refuse of Glug and Ciggy City push the marginalised into the titular sludge, which in turn manifests itself as a cult’s centre of adoration that is coaxed into rendering a Neo-Ciggy City a la Akira with a hyper-poisonous psilocybin mushroom. The gravity of this world of utter slime and filth is interspersed with every joke about the composite elements that would go into the making of that filth possible, including the best line of accidental poetry about a huge shit I’ve ever seen. The swings of subject matter and how Vellman handles the depths and heights can only play out so wonderfully in the architecture that houses it so well, and in spaces which allow that sort of communication in the proper aesthetic housing.

The music is great too!

Slowly coming back to new games after taking a break for a few months.

What can I say? It's repetitious, trite, and thematically impoverished. But what else could one expect from a AAA game adapted from a billion dollar property designed, in the 21st century, to be a milquetoast 'everything to everyone' consumable? Not everything can be Across The Spider-verse.

Wonderfully sculpted dog vomit

I've let too much time pass between playing this and writing my review, and I'm horrible about taking notes on my experience, so I won't try to articulate at any length something in depth. So in short:

It's a cute game that kind of feels like the generic version of the big studio "polished, well reviewed, might be nominated for but would never win GOTY" but on an indie scale. It offers no surprises whatsoever, is so pick up and play if you're familiar with isometric controls, has basically no difficulty in it at all, and has a few memeable moments of quaintness. It's so easy to consume that Death's Door could be administered via IV.

For me, this was a palate cleanser game, so to really try and consider it as an entity apart from my personal decision to play it as something which isn’t a proper exegesis of its own identity, instead, using it as a functioning way to return to my own personal levelling point, would be dishonest and kind of insincere criticism. So rather than trying to suss out successes and failures, contrasting them inherently with what they saddle up beside in the mix abreast each other, I’ll just write down a few of the things that I liked about Curse Crackers, from my experience and what I’ve got going on, as well as from what is just text within.

- Normally, I hate the “uWu”, anime, naive girl squad as roster for a video game; I think it’s profoundly embarrassing in Nier, grossly exploitative in any the various Gacha games that spend their unscrupulously earned profits on solely advertising and Viagra, and a consistently mild irritation in games like Momodora, Signalis, and Unsighted. Curse Crackers kind of got through my distaste for this character design though, and in a way that I wouldn’t have expected from the promotional material surrounding the game. The banner splash on the store page is exactly the kind of grossly immature and perverse fetishization and objectification expected from a lot of games which opt to use modern anime styling: breasts half hung out, swooping hair used as tentative covering, enormous eyes set into faces untouched by any age or experience; this store page is, however, basically the only place this caricatured imagery will appear. In the game proper, due to the pixelation of the Gameboy borrowed rendering, everything about the characters, both their sprites in play as well as their portraits, are so nebulous in their approximation of human forms that they can’t rely on titillation to be appreciated. So, in place of that overdone farce, the animation is mostly used, with the weird proportions of anime as groundwork, to effect a very silent film era comedy. Instead of telling jokes that cause the character portraits to sweat, drool, and blush (as done in the “jokes'' of some of the ignoble cousins to this aesthetic), the humour in this game comes from the procedural setting up of a situation, with the clarity of the level art also being a high spot for the game, interacting with the character stretching into tableaus from Hellzapoppin, or from goofishly oafing around mundane spaces like The Tramp, or deadpanning to the camera like Buster Keaton. Even the character costumes that one can unlock through play are much more Abbott and Costello than Honey Pop - silly play dress up as one winks at the audience instead of fulfilling a vastness of sexual reduction (it helps that Belle actually wears costumes and not, like, a tie and a hat signifying ‘business’ over pasties).

- Maybe I’m in kind of a low play sort of place, but the fact that this game can be breezed through without worrying about jump precision or frame perfect double jumps or wall clings on pixel exact collisions is so refreshing. I love a maso-core platformer - like, gimme 1001 spikes while recovering from surgery: I’ll feel loved - but I really didn’t need this month a game goading me into deleting it. I know that some people will play this when they are looking to drench themselves in sweat and build up their thumb calluses (and I might have felt the opposite to how I do now were I looking for that kind of game as well), but it felt so good to just talk on the phone with my mom and mindlessly ace these levels.

- Similar to the last point, but I love hit-the-boss-3-times fights right now. A good health bar battle of attrition smackdown has a title for accomplishment that is more difficult to deliver with a simpler design, such as that in Curse Crackers, for achieving victory that pervades this easier route, but I think that when catering to this feeling of overcoming has gone from a design goal that can be nuanced to a routine part of 2020s game design skinner boxing: it’s a part of the loop to feed engagement, not necessarily the peak of coalescing goals which have been weaved throughout other various components of the game. The 3 hit model is more deployed as a little topper - almost superfluous to the actual experience of play. Curse Crackers uses its bosses almost more as showing off the clarity that can be achieved by increasing the allowable maximum size of their model scales, again reinforcing comedy in the possibility afforded by how things are rendered. Something about stomping on a skeleton who has a mohawk growing from the bone of their skull three times (interspersed with an extremely stripped back Guitar Hero) keeps the pace flowing, keeps the joke from growing stale, keeps the mood light, and allows for a little art flex on the dev’s side.

A ton of this game is forgettable: the dialogue is extremely skimmable, the sense of place is pretty nil, the puzzling is non-existent, and any mechanic or system outside of the platform and throwing is tagged on without purpose. But it was so exactly what I needed, I can’t help but be happy with the time I spent in this fun little circus.

I have nothing much to say about the design, history, artistic merit, thematic resonance, or any plumbable topic of depth with which a person trying to conceive of something meritorious inherent to Mario, Bowser’s Fury specifically but the general statement stands, which may be drawn on for fuelant to inspire criticism. 3D Mario games generally, with the elsewise brand expressions being as a whole still encompassed but to a lesser degree, move me not at all to thrill or agonise; they do not deposit me to a prolonged convalescence from rapture nor a disappearing into mist that arises some self doubt; the antics in do not put before me a self which I can see as bettered or worsened. I can think of nothing in myself to pull from play to paper other than surmising that games, with their inset holding of many excellent offerings of Mario, which are so consistently fruitful and nutritious, showing in their prodigious production no sign of overflowing the cellar nor going bad in storage, are still in a period (which they may never leave from either external pressures or internal transfigurations) of such infancy that there manages a dominant hold of an entire orbiting shape of their format, medium, expressionistic vocabulary - however else expressed - which is composed of an idea which is sterile, contained, utterable only in relation to itself, and which controls the traffic of anything which has sprung up in the ecosystem it has hardened to externalities but softened to itself.

In the wake of the Mario movie’s enormous success, dwarfing likely any other single Mario property’s profits by a daily increasing margin, the comparative draw on the dire shape of film audience ability to be met en masse and the enormous accessibility of games to the PC game demographic has, for me, been recast. Whereas The Mario movie has now made more money than the entire filmographies of some of the greatest filmmakers (possibly even more than the entire film industry in some directors’ countries of origin), the film industry, with all its structural and cultural issues, has been able to establish the bedrock for possibility and what contrasting heights and lows are possible outside of any singular name or film; the Mario movie dwarfing in recognition Jonas Mekas by a margin of ∞:1 is not offerable as any miniscule shred of proof as being superior or in anyway equally significant to the artistry possible within the medium. In games, that may never be possible. To talk about the entire etymology of not just the verb titles, but the actions possible in describing those verbs outside of the magic circle, cannot be divorced from the IP which dominates its form’s facade.

Good or bad, Mario is Coca-Cola, Kleenex, Band-Aid, and Kraft Dinner.