BeauTartep
2016
Certainly serviceable as a puzzle game with twitch challenges thrown in to keep the seat from getting to inlaid underneath you, it fails in its repetition in ways that the obvious influences didn't (Hotline Miami, Gunpoint) and in ways that were not issues in the dev's other works. I'm glad that the studio was able to take a break away from Risk of Rain in between the first and second instalment in that series, so the itches in the software feel more like picking a real stalactite of a scab off than a mosquito bite, but they returned to what they knew with such aplomb that makes it feel as though the deviation was really a dead end for their appetites.
2014
It would be interesting to uncover a bit of research into which of the almost endless entry points players took when arriving at the Resident Evil series; having shambled along, slithered across, and dug through the subterranean of the highly varying video game landscapes that transpired between our modern era and the fossilised 1996, Resident Evil has encouraged a heterogeneous population within its fandom unseen in the fauna of most AAA IPs fence boundaries. From survival horror to action horror to horror action to straight action, all while keeping the comedy of everything very much alive; roping in first person, third person, multiplayer focused, score attack arcade modes, online asymmetrical multiplayer, squad tactics, and more. Players have come from Silent Hill, Call of Duty, Demon’s Souls, Monkey Island, and Myst: all of them feeling at home within the endless, and still expanding, boundaries of RE. Of course there are age demographic influences - I first came on the tracks with RE4 (maybe the most common entry point just due to proliferation and staying power) - but for a series so obsessed, and excellent in their handling with, architecture, I think it’s fair to commit to an assumption that there is a semi-solid and slick superstructure in our collective videogame metropolis that subtly funnels players from all burroughs into the heart of Racoon City.
Seeing the past in hindsight can kill a good historical idea; choosing to disallow agency to the contexts of a world we’ve moved on from, its actors somehow fated for what they will receive, from the calendar years coming and from our perspective apart, is a surefire way to deaden the creativity and stupidity of uniquely beautiful human experiences, that mess of a shambolic grease lair surely a wonder if there ever was one to visit at a gallery. But for a wee exercise, let’s compare briefly how different the RE of 2002 was to today. In 2022, Resident Evil is everything that was stated above: fps, tps, asymmetrical multiplayer, etc. It is a series content only with being an entire medium’s worth of investigative in-game actions purposed towards uncovering the various viruses and parasites infesting that version of reality. In 2002, RE was at a critical breaking point typified by having an ill-contentedness of being anything beyond that era’s definition of survival horror, despite the RE series itself essentially writing the guidebook for the still extremely young genre. The action slowly ramping up in RE3, the cast expanding in Code Veronica, the boundaries of play atrophying into something more elastic in Survivor; every step taken away from the template was seen as a germ of treason making insurgents of every model and verb within the expanding Resident Evil universe. That trepidation to move beyond might seem to some prudent and exacting of the formula which would allow instalments of spooky mansions puzzles through and twisted scientists foiled to visit the public once every few years. It might seem to others a cowardly and conditional respect the creators have for the evolving face of their creative ambitions and the respect their audience has for the team’s authorial flexing. I think what at that time, without inserting myself from 2022 into 2002, would have astounded both camps was the idea to revisit the land of bumper crop creepies after straying far afield and announcing, ‘that yield abundant wasn’t good enough.’
OK, mythologizing aside, Shinji Mikami and his team having returned to rebuild one of the holy sites of survival horror was one of the grandest gifts for gaming and its possibilities as an evolving medium. Not only was it a simultaneous affirmation of design as a flexile and permeable art that could erode lands, be boiled through different states, and shaped into sculptures, pillars, and tools, it was also a triumph for the ways in which video games can be seen as a oral art - a space in which traditions are lost in their matter but continuous in their evocation: one program dies as all ports and platform support fades away but further lives on in the designers acting like carrion angels with its corpse, feeding on morsels twenty years away. Returning to their own work, now past in generations which had rapidly evolved beyond the limitations it had been set behind, styles it had aped going from cool to gauche, dominance of market going from pulp to prestige, the team was able to use some alchemist’s stone in foiling copper to gold. The forgoing of tank controls alone is almost certainly the largest influence in why REmake lives on in a way that the original no longer can: that scheme concerned the limitations of the PS1 with moderate eloquence, and it was never as bad as it is now made out to be, but drop in and play will always mesh with an experiential medium far more elegantly than frictional stoppage. Very few emotions or tones in art can coalesce well with input frustration; it is very difficult to feel the tension of a zombie closing off an available passage when, open or not, the passage is a nightmare to cross with your available toolset. The broadening of system interaction is also marvellously managed - the introduction of Crimson Heads and their dispatch turns what was more or less a metroidvania without movement verbs making backtracking a delight instead of a chore, it takes that retreading aspect of that genre and survival horrors it: the backtracking is done out of desperation, fear, scarcity, and ratcheting risks popping up the mansion over - essentially turning the metroidvania unlocking ‘I can’t wait to go there’ into a survival horror ‘I have to get back there… or else.’
The general flavour of the updated and more professionally curated art assets and VO is up to preference when judging whether it trumps or fails the 1996 original, but it looks marvellous to me in a way the 96 game merely looked functional. The cinematic strength of both the moment to moment play as well as the cinematics speaks to a general trend set in both the indie sphere (such as the utter brilliance of 30 Flights editing making the narrative art) as well as the AAA sphere up to today (The Last of Us isn’t just calling back with zombies, you know). It’s association of characters with space, setting up tiny denouements of dramatic irony in every encounter Jill or Chris has with a zombie that the player may not see or the PC may not see; it’s rigorous cinematic counter-argument to the betrayals of Barry making a strong point against the moralistic ask of how big of a person can you really be when asked to step up; Wesker more or less looks like a god and rightly is treated like one: the entire shape of what we see is brilliant in every aspect (Lisa Trevor fancam incoming).
Nobody needs to be convinced to play this game 20 years later, they’re either already saddling up to visit the Spencer Mansion or they aren’t. It isn’t a must play game because no games are must play games. But if there is one game that linchpins early 3D gaming to modern 3D gaming, it’s RE4. But there’s no RE4 without REmake.
Seeing the past in hindsight can kill a good historical idea; choosing to disallow agency to the contexts of a world we’ve moved on from, its actors somehow fated for what they will receive, from the calendar years coming and from our perspective apart, is a surefire way to deaden the creativity and stupidity of uniquely beautiful human experiences, that mess of a shambolic grease lair surely a wonder if there ever was one to visit at a gallery. But for a wee exercise, let’s compare briefly how different the RE of 2002 was to today. In 2022, Resident Evil is everything that was stated above: fps, tps, asymmetrical multiplayer, etc. It is a series content only with being an entire medium’s worth of investigative in-game actions purposed towards uncovering the various viruses and parasites infesting that version of reality. In 2002, RE was at a critical breaking point typified by having an ill-contentedness of being anything beyond that era’s definition of survival horror, despite the RE series itself essentially writing the guidebook for the still extremely young genre. The action slowly ramping up in RE3, the cast expanding in Code Veronica, the boundaries of play atrophying into something more elastic in Survivor; every step taken away from the template was seen as a germ of treason making insurgents of every model and verb within the expanding Resident Evil universe. That trepidation to move beyond might seem to some prudent and exacting of the formula which would allow instalments of spooky mansions puzzles through and twisted scientists foiled to visit the public once every few years. It might seem to others a cowardly and conditional respect the creators have for the evolving face of their creative ambitions and the respect their audience has for the team’s authorial flexing. I think what at that time, without inserting myself from 2022 into 2002, would have astounded both camps was the idea to revisit the land of bumper crop creepies after straying far afield and announcing, ‘that yield abundant wasn’t good enough.’
OK, mythologizing aside, Shinji Mikami and his team having returned to rebuild one of the holy sites of survival horror was one of the grandest gifts for gaming and its possibilities as an evolving medium. Not only was it a simultaneous affirmation of design as a flexile and permeable art that could erode lands, be boiled through different states, and shaped into sculptures, pillars, and tools, it was also a triumph for the ways in which video games can be seen as a oral art - a space in which traditions are lost in their matter but continuous in their evocation: one program dies as all ports and platform support fades away but further lives on in the designers acting like carrion angels with its corpse, feeding on morsels twenty years away. Returning to their own work, now past in generations which had rapidly evolved beyond the limitations it had been set behind, styles it had aped going from cool to gauche, dominance of market going from pulp to prestige, the team was able to use some alchemist’s stone in foiling copper to gold. The forgoing of tank controls alone is almost certainly the largest influence in why REmake lives on in a way that the original no longer can: that scheme concerned the limitations of the PS1 with moderate eloquence, and it was never as bad as it is now made out to be, but drop in and play will always mesh with an experiential medium far more elegantly than frictional stoppage. Very few emotions or tones in art can coalesce well with input frustration; it is very difficult to feel the tension of a zombie closing off an available passage when, open or not, the passage is a nightmare to cross with your available toolset. The broadening of system interaction is also marvellously managed - the introduction of Crimson Heads and their dispatch turns what was more or less a metroidvania without movement verbs making backtracking a delight instead of a chore, it takes that retreading aspect of that genre and survival horrors it: the backtracking is done out of desperation, fear, scarcity, and ratcheting risks popping up the mansion over - essentially turning the metroidvania unlocking ‘I can’t wait to go there’ into a survival horror ‘I have to get back there… or else.’
The general flavour of the updated and more professionally curated art assets and VO is up to preference when judging whether it trumps or fails the 1996 original, but it looks marvellous to me in a way the 96 game merely looked functional. The cinematic strength of both the moment to moment play as well as the cinematics speaks to a general trend set in both the indie sphere (such as the utter brilliance of 30 Flights editing making the narrative art) as well as the AAA sphere up to today (The Last of Us isn’t just calling back with zombies, you know). It’s association of characters with space, setting up tiny denouements of dramatic irony in every encounter Jill or Chris has with a zombie that the player may not see or the PC may not see; it’s rigorous cinematic counter-argument to the betrayals of Barry making a strong point against the moralistic ask of how big of a person can you really be when asked to step up; Wesker more or less looks like a god and rightly is treated like one: the entire shape of what we see is brilliant in every aspect (Lisa Trevor fancam incoming).
Nobody needs to be convinced to play this game 20 years later, they’re either already saddling up to visit the Spencer Mansion or they aren’t. It isn’t a must play game because no games are must play games. But if there is one game that linchpins early 3D gaming to modern 3D gaming, it’s RE4. But there’s no RE4 without REmake.
2017
I love Tyler Colp for this:
per PC Gamer roasting beloved games, Colp says, "Nier: Automata is for weebs who haven't read a book or watched a movie. It's cliché sci-fi anime garbage that only feels like it means something because the music owns and Yoko Taro Googled "socialism". Nier: Replicant is a better game because it gives its characters space to be humans, which is pretty important in a game about what it means to be human."
per PC Gamer roasting beloved games, Colp says, "Nier: Automata is for weebs who haven't read a book or watched a movie. It's cliché sci-fi anime garbage that only feels like it means something because the music owns and Yoko Taro Googled "socialism". Nier: Replicant is a better game because it gives its characters space to be humans, which is pretty important in a game about what it means to be human."
2016
Look, it's not a bad game, but there is nothing on this earth that is more poisonous to me than this shit.
2022
Has there been an uptick in our attenuation, culturally and individually, to the Icarus myth? Maybe this is one of the biases of living through a history of culture, one piled with objects more opulent, ever present, and referentially potent than at any time previously in its possibility amongst human states, as opposed to consuming that history but in the 21st century Icarus has seemed to draw more fascination and sunlight than had been, anecdotally, spotlighting his ascents and descents in the time between his first flight and now. As time has worn on, as time has allowed the delocalisation of centres of communication standing in for the varying world’s working class’s abilities to express sentiment and empathy between each other in a form and with functions not propped up by their non-elected representational nationalistic enterprises isolating them in hierarchical and interested speech, it seems as though evocation through myth has come to ground from its former place atop Mountains Olympus and Halls Valhalla. I’ve had it most obviously intended for me with Anne Carson’s mythical interpretations as well as the mythos interpreted and remade in Anders Nilsen’s Rage of Poseidon but clearly the trend is occurring heavily in games at the moment: God of War greatly pathologized it’s antagonistic forces with a humanism bred from systemic failures that occurred not in the grandiose melodramas of its earlier games, and Hades tenders from its pantheon a kind of postmodern conscientious empathy that occurs in our highly dialogic ecosystem with a form directly opposite to traditional mythic portrayals of the same characters. It seems like myth has been reorganised from a top down affair, seeing from which great heights may lend fall, to one that describes from the bottom a rebuke, whereupon that which falls leaves a mess and kills a friend.
The Icarus myth has been traditionally taught to be a display of one figure’s failure in recognising what constitutes hubristic reach and how behaviours can teach us our limits. Today, often without the name attached but with the wings stapled on just the same, we learn from Icarus what a small reach beyond one’s station will incur from that which our world revolves around. Citizen Sleeper has its beginning fawn like an Icarus who flew to the Sun and fell but on treacherous orbits breached was instead caught in a gravitational pull of something other than earth, where knowing what Daedelus wrought wasn’t attached to a spheres of gods but to that which was dominated over by their powers disattached. For their Sleeper, that wrought flight is not one of hubris expected by one out of their domain but of the thrust into the styx of which exploitations beget further exploitations entrusted to us in our purchased complicity (or more likely, what is societally enforced through however many propagandistic excesses are necessitated in our connections and expressions). In showing this fall, or rather flak shredding gravitational pull, CS in a lot of ways interstates the driving urge to develop a character from the outset of an RPG experience: entering your machinations at the where there has been a turning point in the remaking of a life, a chance which has become the driving force coinciding one’s becoming strange in the ways which announce value and type to systemic architectures.
This is the axis Citizen Sleeper ultimately fails itself and succeeds on. Thematically, it cannot allow the player character to become god emperor of the domains they plaster all eyesight aboard, indicating an examination of the mechanical emphases that place play subsidiary to narratives of specifically modern and potentially “eventual” complexity but no introspective complexity which devalues intentions of action with accessibility to action within the systems and within the narrative, backseating both into, at its most optimistic, making do with whatever you are given that day(often less do we see triumphs of the genre take this route, more frequently changing perspective of audience within these worlds of exponentiality from primary protagonist to ancillary protagonist a la Witcher 3). In play, this works for a while to an extraordinary degree - the first 3-4 hours are a taut balancing act between starving, being shot, wearing away into a carcass sprouting circuitry, and losing yourself amidst a sea of askers promising gifts without seeing those boons fessed. After that however, having reached the end of one or two quests and receiving the surprisingly large paydays squirrelled out from people ostensibly in the same situation as your PC, the tension is deflated entirely: you are never at a loss for good rolls, cash, and things to do, and by the final third you have presumably removed the target on your back as well. The mechanics which create scarcity, because of their function as a model for capitalism fucking people over, eventually lead you to become the 1% of your little world because that’s just how economics work when you are the most active agent with the greatest leniency to invest and divest. I don’t know what the devs could’ve done to really keep the boot down without making the game both far more complex as well as miserable, but their systems ironically fucked them over in ways totally unrelated to cash.
It’s unfortunate as well that at the end of things, with hordes of 6 die rolls and credits and mushrooms and corporate intel, your Sleeper is no different looking in their perspective and adaptability than when first starting the game. While there is a generously branching skill tree which can create preferences for activities on the station, there is no actual characterization to generally differentiate what these acts are informing in the state of play or narrative - you may be a mechanic by defect of muscle proclivity but you interact with the barkeeps in just the same dialogue as an artist or diplomat. There are options for dialogue, and of course the player will have characters for whom they invest the only scarce resource, interest, in, but they are choices in the vein of “hell yeah” and “that went well”. As well written and pursuant of depth Citizen Sleep is, make no mistake, the dice are not those found in Dicey Dungeons or Disco Elysium: it’s choose your own adventure visual novel territory.
Has Jump Over The Age flown too close to the sun? No, I don’t think so. You market the game however you can to try and proliferate it, and RPGs are big for a reason. A bit of slapdash game design, which does legitimately impart the feelings attempted for a while, on a worthwhile and well told narrative concerning highly prescient and necessary issues is still all that with just a bit extra. If they were a broader studio with a bigger budget, it’s easy to see that the final product would appear to us as a different spectre haunting not just the space above Europe but also any devs making +2% fire damage weapon skill trees. But this isn’t an RPG killer even if it is a killer little game.
The Icarus myth has been traditionally taught to be a display of one figure’s failure in recognising what constitutes hubristic reach and how behaviours can teach us our limits. Today, often without the name attached but with the wings stapled on just the same, we learn from Icarus what a small reach beyond one’s station will incur from that which our world revolves around. Citizen Sleeper has its beginning fawn like an Icarus who flew to the Sun and fell but on treacherous orbits breached was instead caught in a gravitational pull of something other than earth, where knowing what Daedelus wrought wasn’t attached to a spheres of gods but to that which was dominated over by their powers disattached. For their Sleeper, that wrought flight is not one of hubris expected by one out of their domain but of the thrust into the styx of which exploitations beget further exploitations entrusted to us in our purchased complicity (or more likely, what is societally enforced through however many propagandistic excesses are necessitated in our connections and expressions). In showing this fall, or rather flak shredding gravitational pull, CS in a lot of ways interstates the driving urge to develop a character from the outset of an RPG experience: entering your machinations at the where there has been a turning point in the remaking of a life, a chance which has become the driving force coinciding one’s becoming strange in the ways which announce value and type to systemic architectures.
This is the axis Citizen Sleeper ultimately fails itself and succeeds on. Thematically, it cannot allow the player character to become god emperor of the domains they plaster all eyesight aboard, indicating an examination of the mechanical emphases that place play subsidiary to narratives of specifically modern and potentially “eventual” complexity but no introspective complexity which devalues intentions of action with accessibility to action within the systems and within the narrative, backseating both into, at its most optimistic, making do with whatever you are given that day(often less do we see triumphs of the genre take this route, more frequently changing perspective of audience within these worlds of exponentiality from primary protagonist to ancillary protagonist a la Witcher 3). In play, this works for a while to an extraordinary degree - the first 3-4 hours are a taut balancing act between starving, being shot, wearing away into a carcass sprouting circuitry, and losing yourself amidst a sea of askers promising gifts without seeing those boons fessed. After that however, having reached the end of one or two quests and receiving the surprisingly large paydays squirrelled out from people ostensibly in the same situation as your PC, the tension is deflated entirely: you are never at a loss for good rolls, cash, and things to do, and by the final third you have presumably removed the target on your back as well. The mechanics which create scarcity, because of their function as a model for capitalism fucking people over, eventually lead you to become the 1% of your little world because that’s just how economics work when you are the most active agent with the greatest leniency to invest and divest. I don’t know what the devs could’ve done to really keep the boot down without making the game both far more complex as well as miserable, but their systems ironically fucked them over in ways totally unrelated to cash.
It’s unfortunate as well that at the end of things, with hordes of 6 die rolls and credits and mushrooms and corporate intel, your Sleeper is no different looking in their perspective and adaptability than when first starting the game. While there is a generously branching skill tree which can create preferences for activities on the station, there is no actual characterization to generally differentiate what these acts are informing in the state of play or narrative - you may be a mechanic by defect of muscle proclivity but you interact with the barkeeps in just the same dialogue as an artist or diplomat. There are options for dialogue, and of course the player will have characters for whom they invest the only scarce resource, interest, in, but they are choices in the vein of “hell yeah” and “that went well”. As well written and pursuant of depth Citizen Sleep is, make no mistake, the dice are not those found in Dicey Dungeons or Disco Elysium: it’s choose your own adventure visual novel territory.
Has Jump Over The Age flown too close to the sun? No, I don’t think so. You market the game however you can to try and proliferate it, and RPGs are big for a reason. A bit of slapdash game design, which does legitimately impart the feelings attempted for a while, on a worthwhile and well told narrative concerning highly prescient and necessary issues is still all that with just a bit extra. If they were a broader studio with a bigger budget, it’s easy to see that the final product would appear to us as a different spectre haunting not just the space above Europe but also any devs making +2% fire damage weapon skill trees. But this isn’t an RPG killer even if it is a killer little game.
2022
About as close to scarfing down roadside farmer's market fudge as you can get; it feels intuitive, homespun, and polished in your hands only to sit like a rock in your gut and leave you thinking about what a weird decision it was to work over for as long as was allowed. I'm a bit unsure of what the market for this game is other than broaching the game time gulf between something like Steamworld Dig and Terraria - it's a much worse resource gathering/exploration game than Dig, with far less rewarding navigation, movement, and reveals than what is found in both entries of that series, and is far less expressive mechanically in breadth and depth than Terraria, which obviously has so much generally to offer in terms of tools that to ape any 2D base building of its type is to start to doom yourself. The 30-90 minute play window per run is nice but really other than being a well optimized piece of software that can be mindlessly chewed on, except for the minor base defence that really is less rewarding in both types than something like Aegis Defenders or, idk, Greed Mode in Isaac, much less Terraria, it's a bit tough to get the overall play point.
2006
I really don't go in for the flavour, not that I want the serious tone of the dev team's first draft, but the complexity and granular allowances of change given to the player are a remarkable feat for the medium. The skill floor is low enough to allow any player to get a grasp at how to get better, and I don't know if there is a skill ceiling. I wish there was a Dark Souls like lock on feature, I frequently lost track of single targets and was getting side-swiped by enemies faster than my camera constantly, but these systems in a game with tidier aesthetics and a better pace of play would be a real treat.
Just as a taste, can you imagine Hand of Fate with this combat instead of bs Batman style button mashing? Holy cannoli.
Just as a taste, can you imagine Hand of Fate with this combat instead of bs Batman style button mashing? Holy cannoli.
Reiterating the casualness of what I said for my Evil Within 2 review: I'm behind on writing reviews for what I played so I'm going through those games with just small points that occurred to me while playing.
- This is my first game played in the Metal Gear series (if you discount MGRR) so the narrative weight of, what I've gathered to be from cultural osmosis, legacy characters and their introductions really come off as either shallow or pandering or both. I know Ocelot is nearly as integral to the shape of how casts in Kojima's coalesce into a mixture of soapy camp and military drama as the various Snake's are, and the same is true to a lesser degree (from what I've gathered in some youtube catching up of the over-arching plot of the MG and MGS) of most of the other rotating players here, but clearly there is something lost in the intractability of characters who primarily exposit to each other because their relationships are substantiated not in the narrative or play of the game due to either it not being substantial enough (and really, every interaction can at the very least reinforce characterization if not develop it) or having those characters exist in a vacuum of plot necessary movements devoid of true passion (which given what I've seen in recaps of MG1 through MGS4 isn't the case, but in MGSV it is).
- Even if he doesn't get any remotely interesting narrative action or thematic depth, the visual design of Venom Snake is really interesting and captivating across all costumes and states of play. Yes, a scarred and scraggly military vet is not new or groundbreaking, but the mo-cap sells the beleaguered weight of a now spring so coiled it relaxes with effort instead of firing with effort.
- In the vein of character design, holy cannoli is it inconsistent: Venom Snake is great, the Man on Fire is good, Ocelot, Kazuhira, Huey, and Code Talker are passable, and Quiet, The Skulls (in all forms), and Skull Face are embarrassing, and their unique badness tells on Kojima to a greater degree than most video games in their massive project sizes can for their leads.
- My expectations for the gameplay were about as high as I allow them to get going into the first mission, and even so I was really blown away by the granularity and breadth allowed to the stealth as well as the action. Grasping the sides of buildings and pulling in guards never feels like an affordance of level geometry or of stupid AI (and the same sentiments towards gunfights, sowing fear, storming in on a walker, etc.) but a subconscious nudging along of the assumptions made in the coordination of Snake's character design, kit broadness, encampment verisimilitude to life, and the sheer amount of 'I wonder if I can... holy shit, I can' moments coming up every few minutes. Every second the player is in control in MGSV, the systemic interplay creates as effective a drama about the prowess of Big Boss as the story thinks it does.
- I wish it wasn't open world. I know, everybody likes listening to the tapes and running out of a camp with gun fire pushing their speedometers into the red, but I felt like I was constantly wasting money on deploying cars or hampering my gameplay by going on missions with D-Horse instead of D-Dog or Quiet. Obviously hindsight bla bla bla but as I said with The Evil Within 2, a smaller world that can be swept through and reconquered or aligned over and over is a more ingratiating way of allowing non linear travel while not going full Elden Ring. And even if you want more static environs to allow those running away with just a few bullet holes in your ass shy of killing you, Deathloop works that tension perfectly by allowing you to get to the tunnels and then loading back into the play without putting 10 mins of dune buggying or helicoptering inbetween the actual good parts of the engine's treatment of movement.
- Lightening round: licensed music good, score bad. I only need one of each weapon class! I will never switch assault rifles, don't clutter my menu. Come on, Kojima, you couldn't make patting your soldiers at Mother Base a context sensitive interaction? The sneak suit should more prominently display Snake's cheeks, I want that. That's what makes this a 7/10 instead of an 8. Wtf.
- This is my first game played in the Metal Gear series (if you discount MGRR) so the narrative weight of, what I've gathered to be from cultural osmosis, legacy characters and their introductions really come off as either shallow or pandering or both. I know Ocelot is nearly as integral to the shape of how casts in Kojima's coalesce into a mixture of soapy camp and military drama as the various Snake's are, and the same is true to a lesser degree (from what I've gathered in some youtube catching up of the over-arching plot of the MG and MGS) of most of the other rotating players here, but clearly there is something lost in the intractability of characters who primarily exposit to each other because their relationships are substantiated not in the narrative or play of the game due to either it not being substantial enough (and really, every interaction can at the very least reinforce characterization if not develop it) or having those characters exist in a vacuum of plot necessary movements devoid of true passion (which given what I've seen in recaps of MG1 through MGS4 isn't the case, but in MGSV it is).
- Even if he doesn't get any remotely interesting narrative action or thematic depth, the visual design of Venom Snake is really interesting and captivating across all costumes and states of play. Yes, a scarred and scraggly military vet is not new or groundbreaking, but the mo-cap sells the beleaguered weight of a now spring so coiled it relaxes with effort instead of firing with effort.
- In the vein of character design, holy cannoli is it inconsistent: Venom Snake is great, the Man on Fire is good, Ocelot, Kazuhira, Huey, and Code Talker are passable, and Quiet, The Skulls (in all forms), and Skull Face are embarrassing, and their unique badness tells on Kojima to a greater degree than most video games in their massive project sizes can for their leads.
- My expectations for the gameplay were about as high as I allow them to get going into the first mission, and even so I was really blown away by the granularity and breadth allowed to the stealth as well as the action. Grasping the sides of buildings and pulling in guards never feels like an affordance of level geometry or of stupid AI (and the same sentiments towards gunfights, sowing fear, storming in on a walker, etc.) but a subconscious nudging along of the assumptions made in the coordination of Snake's character design, kit broadness, encampment verisimilitude to life, and the sheer amount of 'I wonder if I can... holy shit, I can' moments coming up every few minutes. Every second the player is in control in MGSV, the systemic interplay creates as effective a drama about the prowess of Big Boss as the story thinks it does.
- I wish it wasn't open world. I know, everybody likes listening to the tapes and running out of a camp with gun fire pushing their speedometers into the red, but I felt like I was constantly wasting money on deploying cars or hampering my gameplay by going on missions with D-Horse instead of D-Dog or Quiet. Obviously hindsight bla bla bla but as I said with The Evil Within 2, a smaller world that can be swept through and reconquered or aligned over and over is a more ingratiating way of allowing non linear travel while not going full Elden Ring. And even if you want more static environs to allow those running away with just a few bullet holes in your ass shy of killing you, Deathloop works that tension perfectly by allowing you to get to the tunnels and then loading back into the play without putting 10 mins of dune buggying or helicoptering inbetween the actual good parts of the engine's treatment of movement.
- Lightening round: licensed music good, score bad. I only need one of each weapon class! I will never switch assault rifles, don't clutter my menu. Come on, Kojima, you couldn't make patting your soldiers at Mother Base a context sensitive interaction? The sneak suit should more prominently display Snake's cheeks, I want that. That's what makes this a 7/10 instead of an 8. Wtf.
2015
One of the best games you can play for free on Steam right now. A triumph.
2018
Atrociously designed by bodyless brains skunked in jars, written by gawking filigrees rolling twitter's stock through high heavens. All interaction is superficial and fictively constructed without organ to the form or commentary on action inherent to the genre or medium; every spit of dialogue is without characterization, euphony, assonance, or syntactic complexity. These characters don't have any personalities of composited or conflicting traits to define them nor histories or foibles finding them out, and what they do to the effect of personal conviction or action is canned, archaic, and terminally enriched in the soil of a library populated only by tumblr illiteracy and twitter reaction.
2017
I'm behind of writing reviews for my played games so the next few will be super casual toss offs of point form thoughts I have on the games without any coalescing ideas or theme to the written reaction
- I like how every chapter that is set in either the residential area or business district has that classic Shinji Mikami difficulty curve: you enter into an area with hostilities that are initially overwhelming and full of enemies outgunning you that, once you hit a certain point in the process of depopulating the arenas while hoovering up items, later shifts from constant anxiety to a power trip where you are totally stocked and at your most powerful. This happens both grandly over the course of the game, going from a barely causing basic mobs to stumble with your peashooter to harpooning former bosses from a block away with smiting crossing bolts, but also with each addition of enemies and area complications into the sandbox of the open world chapters. It's fun, you never fully lose either the empowering or disempowering play periods.
- I wish the stealth had a greater spectrum of tools available to it. The enemy hearing is finely tuned but their sightlines are totally wack - they see with a periphery of 180 degrees and since you can't stealth kill them from anywhere but directly behind them, the herky jerky movement they prowl around with seems like they have been given the more powerful movement mechanics afforded by the engine. I know there are traps you can set, and once you can do your crouch charge and corner kills it works a bit more seamlessly, but it feels underbaked considering how easy it is to kill mobs later on in the game with your expanded 'loud play' expanded arsenal offset by a barely expanded equivalent stealth repertoire.
- Having only played the opening chapter of the first game, I like how The Evil Within 1's iconography is not treated as former set dressing, cadre of the adventure, essential source book text, or a particular serial past its screen. Instead of having it be "last time with Sebastian", the events and actors of the previous game are renewed here for depth that can be assumed without familiarity but which treat the past as a surmounted but lingering height still fogging Sebastian's horizon. It matters more to his character than it does to the player; in our interactions with those returning elements, we can only use our verbs as the same tools used on everything else, but that they return for Sebastian's translative context shows a greater degree of respect for the team's previous works and their world's characters than you get in any Assassin's Creed or Resident Evil, even if those are more lore heavy with more iterations of character moments. It feels like Sebastian was seriously used by the first game that it has never felt like with Leon or Claire.
- The direction of the cinematic sequences fail to ingratiate the ancillary cast into the setting (with exception to Kidman) in any way that feels like they have agency or a relationship with the space. Obviously their being planted within safehouses don't allow them privileges to roam, but given that we see four of the cast whose catalystic placement within STEM instigates the course of the game's events, I would have thought that in the moments the game focuses briefly on that cast, they would have a more entrenched feel within the system. These are characters who know the simulation from many angles, angles which could be used to highlight their expertises (manipulations to the world minor and nebulous/good to offset those of Myra/Stefano/Theodore) and their personalities (Hoffman could be tweaking the holism of the community environment whereas Sykes could be shorting the graphical fidelity to realism to belie the code within). I guess I just wish they didn't feel like pins falling to Sebastian's plot weight rolling like a bowling ball through the plot.
- The foley is mostly great but something about the shotgun sounds feel totally off - the revolver's punch sounds enormous and juicy with echoes reeling off of it, the twang of the crossbow is sufficiently responsive and thunky without superseding the obvious intimacy of a non explosive propellant weapon, yet the shotgun is a hyper compressed .wav file that hardly feels like it plays when firing. I don't know, it felt weird to me.
- The RPG skill mechanics fall off at the end; your economy scales weapons faster and loadouts wider than Sebastian can keep up with them so by the time you're improving healing from 125% efficacy to 150% efficacy, you're never rolling less than 6 health kits anyways so the usefulness of them expanding out doesn't really matter. The same goes with stamina, health, reticle sway, etc.
- OK, speed round: I like the flippant dialogue accompanying the score attack minigames matching how tangential those are, even lampshading the plot a bit. I really don't like Kidman's outfit; the jeans, jacket, and one glove combo is just atrocious and underbaked even next to Dadbastian. Why do you go to the business district so many more times than the residential area? I actually prefer the res area, but once chapter 3 is over, it's bye bye. Snapping to grid should have a greater magnetism, and probably a bit of camera focusing change as well - I had trouble sometimes telling if I was pressed against a wall when it wasn't an obviously flat surface, and seeing past my own model was often difficult as well.
- I like how every chapter that is set in either the residential area or business district has that classic Shinji Mikami difficulty curve: you enter into an area with hostilities that are initially overwhelming and full of enemies outgunning you that, once you hit a certain point in the process of depopulating the arenas while hoovering up items, later shifts from constant anxiety to a power trip where you are totally stocked and at your most powerful. This happens both grandly over the course of the game, going from a barely causing basic mobs to stumble with your peashooter to harpooning former bosses from a block away with smiting crossing bolts, but also with each addition of enemies and area complications into the sandbox of the open world chapters. It's fun, you never fully lose either the empowering or disempowering play periods.
- I wish the stealth had a greater spectrum of tools available to it. The enemy hearing is finely tuned but their sightlines are totally wack - they see with a periphery of 180 degrees and since you can't stealth kill them from anywhere but directly behind them, the herky jerky movement they prowl around with seems like they have been given the more powerful movement mechanics afforded by the engine. I know there are traps you can set, and once you can do your crouch charge and corner kills it works a bit more seamlessly, but it feels underbaked considering how easy it is to kill mobs later on in the game with your expanded 'loud play' expanded arsenal offset by a barely expanded equivalent stealth repertoire.
- Having only played the opening chapter of the first game, I like how The Evil Within 1's iconography is not treated as former set dressing, cadre of the adventure, essential source book text, or a particular serial past its screen. Instead of having it be "last time with Sebastian", the events and actors of the previous game are renewed here for depth that can be assumed without familiarity but which treat the past as a surmounted but lingering height still fogging Sebastian's horizon. It matters more to his character than it does to the player; in our interactions with those returning elements, we can only use our verbs as the same tools used on everything else, but that they return for Sebastian's translative context shows a greater degree of respect for the team's previous works and their world's characters than you get in any Assassin's Creed or Resident Evil, even if those are more lore heavy with more iterations of character moments. It feels like Sebastian was seriously used by the first game that it has never felt like with Leon or Claire.
- The direction of the cinematic sequences fail to ingratiate the ancillary cast into the setting (with exception to Kidman) in any way that feels like they have agency or a relationship with the space. Obviously their being planted within safehouses don't allow them privileges to roam, but given that we see four of the cast whose catalystic placement within STEM instigates the course of the game's events, I would have thought that in the moments the game focuses briefly on that cast, they would have a more entrenched feel within the system. These are characters who know the simulation from many angles, angles which could be used to highlight their expertises (manipulations to the world minor and nebulous/good to offset those of Myra/Stefano/Theodore) and their personalities (Hoffman could be tweaking the holism of the community environment whereas Sykes could be shorting the graphical fidelity to realism to belie the code within). I guess I just wish they didn't feel like pins falling to Sebastian's plot weight rolling like a bowling ball through the plot.
- The foley is mostly great but something about the shotgun sounds feel totally off - the revolver's punch sounds enormous and juicy with echoes reeling off of it, the twang of the crossbow is sufficiently responsive and thunky without superseding the obvious intimacy of a non explosive propellant weapon, yet the shotgun is a hyper compressed .wav file that hardly feels like it plays when firing. I don't know, it felt weird to me.
- The RPG skill mechanics fall off at the end; your economy scales weapons faster and loadouts wider than Sebastian can keep up with them so by the time you're improving healing from 125% efficacy to 150% efficacy, you're never rolling less than 6 health kits anyways so the usefulness of them expanding out doesn't really matter. The same goes with stamina, health, reticle sway, etc.
- OK, speed round: I like the flippant dialogue accompanying the score attack minigames matching how tangential those are, even lampshading the plot a bit. I really don't like Kidman's outfit; the jeans, jacket, and one glove combo is just atrocious and underbaked even next to Dadbastian. Why do you go to the business district so many more times than the residential area? I actually prefer the res area, but once chapter 3 is over, it's bye bye. Snapping to grid should have a greater magnetism, and probably a bit of camera focusing change as well - I had trouble sometimes telling if I was pressed against a wall when it wasn't an obviously flat surface, and seeing past my own model was often difficult as well.
2021
2023:
I'm leaving the below as my initial reaction to how I played the game two years ago, allowing the reality that the frustration I had at the design of the game when bouncing off it the first time was legitimate and would have kept me from ever replaying this game had not other circumstances intervened. That said, while I still think that the combat in NJ is mishandled, having now gone back and completed the game, the mood and atmosphere of Northern Journey is worth struggling through the friction of a badly implemented combat mechanic. There is real magic in this game, and while it can often feel like homework to see the wonderful things within, it is a valuable and unique experience.
2021:
Not rating because I didn't finish the game. The atmosphere is marvellous, the writing is opaque and off-putting with excellent malevolence, and the aesthetic design of the world and its inhabitants is brilliant. But the encounter design is worst in class, perhaps some of the foulest interaction mechanics I've seen in a few years. It takes many ideas from frightening, disempowering games, who in their explorations of mechanical tone took the ideas of horror gaming to new heights, without considering how they were less punishing in practice than in theory: in Northern Journey, enemies have no animations of attack, instead their bodies are hitboxes completely and they all leap at the player repeatedly for their attack cycle. If you graze a sheep, you take 1/6th your health - and you better hope not to graze anything because there are no i-frames after taking damage. Nearly every 3 minutes or so out of 90 minutes of play, I would go down from full health to 0 in less than 1 second due to my PC getting stuck on geometry (which enemies can't get stuck on for some reason; their pathing won't allow them to stop moving so they glitch over ledges) and touching a fly for literally less time than it took to hit the jump button and then touch the ground. And you'll be running a lot because the ammo is scarce, which is fine, and enemies have no leashes at all. And even that would be fine, I can deal with having entire herds or colonies chasing me through a swamp, that even kind of fits with the horror comedy of the game - but, for some inscrutable reason, the game requires enemy kill counts to exit to the next area on every area. WHY?! The combat is so achingly bad and so mindbogglingly included that it ruined entirely my experience. Not only that, but in a wild UNO reverse card from DOOM, the enemies move faster than the player's projectiles, so you can shoot an arrow at a sheep and have it dash under its arc to breathe on you and immediately end your game. Oh, and of course you can't save while in combat, which is more than half the game.
Coming right off of Stalker to this, which had the bland setting (compared to its source) with stellar combat, makes me wish this writer/artist had just grabbed somebody for a month or so with help in the designing the combat systems - they are profoundly horrible, literally some of the worst I've seen in a game not universally panned. Compare this to Resident Evil or Silent Hill, games with similar privation and awkward control - they allowed the player to jostle an enemy at the right time to get out of the way, and at least gave them more than 5 bullets (the ammo cap on your first actually useful weapon, and enemies have no drops at all and the first arena needs you to kill 45 to get through - seriously wtf) if they screwed up. In the original RE, it would take maybe 30 seconds to go from full health to dead, and that is considered hugely punishing in the genre.
If you think you can deal with truly horrendous play (and I'm talking 50 times the frustration of Pathologic) then the world and character design is wonderful and worth seeing. I couldn't struggle through it.
I'm leaving the below as my initial reaction to how I played the game two years ago, allowing the reality that the frustration I had at the design of the game when bouncing off it the first time was legitimate and would have kept me from ever replaying this game had not other circumstances intervened. That said, while I still think that the combat in NJ is mishandled, having now gone back and completed the game, the mood and atmosphere of Northern Journey is worth struggling through the friction of a badly implemented combat mechanic. There is real magic in this game, and while it can often feel like homework to see the wonderful things within, it is a valuable and unique experience.
2021:
Not rating because I didn't finish the game. The atmosphere is marvellous, the writing is opaque and off-putting with excellent malevolence, and the aesthetic design of the world and its inhabitants is brilliant. But the encounter design is worst in class, perhaps some of the foulest interaction mechanics I've seen in a few years. It takes many ideas from frightening, disempowering games, who in their explorations of mechanical tone took the ideas of horror gaming to new heights, without considering how they were less punishing in practice than in theory: in Northern Journey, enemies have no animations of attack, instead their bodies are hitboxes completely and they all leap at the player repeatedly for their attack cycle. If you graze a sheep, you take 1/6th your health - and you better hope not to graze anything because there are no i-frames after taking damage. Nearly every 3 minutes or so out of 90 minutes of play, I would go down from full health to 0 in less than 1 second due to my PC getting stuck on geometry (which enemies can't get stuck on for some reason; their pathing won't allow them to stop moving so they glitch over ledges) and touching a fly for literally less time than it took to hit the jump button and then touch the ground. And you'll be running a lot because the ammo is scarce, which is fine, and enemies have no leashes at all. And even that would be fine, I can deal with having entire herds or colonies chasing me through a swamp, that even kind of fits with the horror comedy of the game - but, for some inscrutable reason, the game requires enemy kill counts to exit to the next area on every area. WHY?! The combat is so achingly bad and so mindbogglingly included that it ruined entirely my experience. Not only that, but in a wild UNO reverse card from DOOM, the enemies move faster than the player's projectiles, so you can shoot an arrow at a sheep and have it dash under its arc to breathe on you and immediately end your game. Oh, and of course you can't save while in combat, which is more than half the game.
Coming right off of Stalker to this, which had the bland setting (compared to its source) with stellar combat, makes me wish this writer/artist had just grabbed somebody for a month or so with help in the designing the combat systems - they are profoundly horrible, literally some of the worst I've seen in a game not universally panned. Compare this to Resident Evil or Silent Hill, games with similar privation and awkward control - they allowed the player to jostle an enemy at the right time to get out of the way, and at least gave them more than 5 bullets (the ammo cap on your first actually useful weapon, and enemies have no drops at all and the first arena needs you to kill 45 to get through - seriously wtf) if they screwed up. In the original RE, it would take maybe 30 seconds to go from full health to dead, and that is considered hugely punishing in the genre.
If you think you can deal with truly horrendous play (and I'm talking 50 times the frustration of Pathologic) then the world and character design is wonderful and worth seeing. I couldn't struggle through it.
A reasonably unique open world shooter that falls short due to lack of incident or broader depth in its systemic interplay. The gun play, for all its simplicity, remains tense and exciting for longer than most other open world efforts of the era but can't cover the rest of the shallowness generally with enough tarpaulin to make up for the lacks in writing, expansion of the world from the novel, and world design outside of the enemy encounter zones (which are excellent arenas for showcasing the firefights). The pacing of meting out new firearm options is exciting, and making the sniper rifle a late game enhancement that slows down and makes wider all firefighting and the spaces it takes place in is brilliant, but ultimately is let down by how little there is to interact with in concert with those shooting systems (something something MGSV).
Replayed this because I thought maybe I was missing out on a masterpiece. And yeah, it's better than I thought it was but it isn't a god send, it's a class above so much of what we see from AAA studios but it didn't wow me on another run through. Maybe on my next playthrough in 4 years though.
2022
Obviously inspired by Hollow Knight foremost in the design world of Metroidvanias, Haiku earns a good deal of the charm that its primary source of inspiration has peddled on for years while the hollowed out buggy fanbase stews waiting for Silksong. The world of Haiku spans a grand stretch that feels like it goes on infinitely in every direction with each area, each little biome taking on different aesthetic hues and enemy varieties just like in Hollownest. You hack and slash your way through infected enemies previously known to be docile while meeting pockets of quarantined robots with quaint and seemingly flippant goals considering the world's state. You've got chips that are charms, you've got dreamers who are primary programs, and you've got got a tram that's a train. But for every of Haiku's flourishes of grandeur that have been translated well from HK, there are matching fumbles of phrase fastly followed: the sword play fails to differentiate its animations enough depending on the directionality of the swing, so every attack feels less like you're a duelist in a swordfight and more like you're a pulsing hurt box; the enemies have no hurt animations, so even further the combat feels frigid and unengaging; the differing zones have aesthetic palette swaps but are built of much the same angles of incursion and are infested with barely differing types of enemies, making the world's aesthetic differences differentiating areas feel shallow; the upgrades are empowering for unlocking pathways but feel frustratingly simplistic in how they evolve gameplay (largely the grappling hook and dash which already allowed i-frames for dodging at the beginning of the game); the writing bounces off in style completely because of the lack of character differentiation and gratuity of nouns without verb or adjective included in what the player sees - it is descriptive of exclusively unseen and abstract events which cannot be sympathized with. All the little touches which makes Hollow Knight one of the greatest games of all time are completely absent in the xerox here.
It's still a cute little game, and the fact that they didn't copy the 40 hours of play Hollow Knight offers, instead wrapping at a svelte 7 or so for near 100% completion, makes it a much more pleasant experience. I would actually very much recommend it but only if you can deal with feeling like the lack of Silksong is far greater after completing Haiku than before.
It's still a cute little game, and the fact that they didn't copy the 40 hours of play Hollow Knight offers, instead wrapping at a svelte 7 or so for near 100% completion, makes it a much more pleasant experience. I would actually very much recommend it but only if you can deal with feeling like the lack of Silksong is far greater after completing Haiku than before.