The build as it stands of this writing might look entirely unlike what the fully implemented version of Vampire Survivors will be, but for the time being it's hard to imagine the gameplay loop changing all that much. Regardless, what is available now is a humourous enough riff on both Castlevania iconography and how idle play can be without actually calling that play constituent of an idle game (which may actually have more to do with animation than interaction given the state of idle games in 2022). It's often frustrating, and more often inelegant, but the warts are more well displayed as character and purposeful jank than as blockage in the game's pipeline to fun - momentum is completely off curve but in a way that makes the first 5 minutes of any match the most engaging, so you are able to get a short play session that doesn't drag out the misery of a dead run or a long play session that, while laughably simple, is at least well rewarded for its length.

Kind of weird that, even with companies like Dodge Roll naming themselves after movement mechanics, the general dungeon-crawler inspired indie mass hasn't really congregated that much around the simple delight of planar traversal in any of its various games that take Zelda's screen by screen transition template. There was bound to be a game that understands how purely distilled a game's desirability can be, unscientifically, of course, according to this metric, by how good it feels to crank up the PC's movement speed and race across a room, especially if you get to bob and weave around enemies while maintaining your hyper-sonic momentum. Disc Room feels like if you modded Isaac to spawn only trap rooms, start the player with 2.0 speed, acquire 5 Mini Mushes, and get wrapped in a cohesive and more generally pleasing skin.

There is a lot of scholarship on how games do or do not enforce defensive types of play, but Disc Room puts forth in its environmental interaction type a soft thesis that, maybe, defensive play is born out of offensive play being a counter-balance to a defensive moveset. In each Disc (filled) Room, having no ability to counteract the danger existentially, the player never has the opportunity to rest on hope for an exsanguination of the threats present by encamping in cowed ferocity; the only progressive path is that which hurdles play towards the requirements for long term survival, which herein is that which is defined by aggressively seeking the tidiest lack of death in immediacy.

I came at this game with very little nostalgia for the design ethos of the 90s shooter; I've never played Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, Wolfenstein 3D, Marathon, Doom 2, or Hexen, largely because what little of that era I've tapped into felt like an exercise in historically contextualizing the lineage shooters have much diverged from than my seeking out a delivery mechanism of adrenaline fueled, non-stop aggressive play that is so frequently touted as the main characteristic of early 90s shooters. And, if I'm being honest, that type of hyperactive, all out play is not terribly enticing when I think about it abstractly in comparison to the mechanized, Ford-like construction of a dynamic encounter curve, differentiated with sculpted ebbs and flows of broader systemic play, that I had grown up with in 2nd gen FPSs, some of which purposely de-emphasized the shooting part of FPSs, so as to, maybe foolishly given the marketability the genre went through for 15 years after Doom, force a growth out of the simplistic interaction style gunplay enforces in a systemic state.

Nostalgia, however, has very little to do with Project Warlock's genuine thrill. Where Half-Life felt like the next iteration of the genuinely necessary, yet difficultly foreseen, integration of fidelity into game worlds that the systems pioneered and actionalized by the early Id games, only hinted at in their early shooter catalogue, affected with merely minor afterthoughts, Project Warlock (and DUSK and, to a much lesser extent, Doom (2016)) takes the mechanical interaction a step beyond the game world dissonance that shooters have largely been mired in since Duke Nukem 3D gave way to Half Life gave way to Halo gave way to Bioshock, etc. etc.

While the grounding of the play within a concerted and asserted cause and effect extension of the actual verb set beyond shoot at _____ becomes shot _______, the shooter had to grapple with shot ________ becomes why have you shot _________? As modern 'games about games' have shown, this is a largely fruitless endeavour to interrogate in AAA games because systems orientation for that initial question investigates all necessary questioning but then reinforces an ignorance of it with a game's recidivistic rhetorical structure. Project Warlock plays both sides of the bargain with the framing and world design knelling only gunplay without absolutely abstracting it. Doom did something similar obviously but the context of its gameplay came before it could be regressed, and as such, progressed.

Even if you look at Project Warlock in wireframe, the tunnelling of the PC is deterministic in a way that seems counter-intuitive - yet it sells the world with its play in a way that something like Deus Ex never could with its mechanical interactions. And what's great is you never would wireframe PW because the package is so enticing that the idea of dropping the veneer plays into the arc of the excellently scant narrative explication.

Amazing soundtrack too, wow.

Leaving aside the frankly embarrassing, sexist character design that mars a consistent and readable aesthetic, its sore flowing on the game's otherwise 'neat' face, Dead Estate suffers from parity with reference to its inspirations iconographically but not in its lineal procedural coherency; while we may see the presence of Sweet Home or Gungeon, we are not able to walk those halls and shoot at its inhabitants. Dead Estate is trying to affect itself with the liminal associations of being in the haunted/infested/infernal of its posthoc adopted game parents, but the replayability built into the interactions with the space make it neither so ingratiating nor horrific nor memorable as its influences did with their spaces, and consequently, not so triumphantly returned to with mastery and banishment of anxiety.

There are a few mechanical limitations that may initially seem like problem solvers for calmly limiting chaos in the play space which hinder the toy boxes hinges: the isometric perspective which plays with three dimensions tricks the brain into drawing vectors which plot the cubes of each room with a horizon but because the sprites are 2D and are not affected by distance, any off the ground aiming is pure chance; the economy of smashing and grabbing under clock is trying to force the tension of maximizing prosperity like in Spelunky but with the entire economy structured around the wholesale of an Isaac type item system, it falls apart because there is so little actual player expression or ebb and flow of good and bad acquisitions from the shop in comparison, and the economy is prohibitive to truly wacky builds or exploits (essentially, it follows a flat curve - something the best roguelikes almost never do); its character selection seemingly offers many ways to traverse in and engage with the house, but in practice more blatantly shows that any engagement with the playspace is, at its baseline, so simplified to allow for progression (which in my 10 hours with the game, never got much beyond what you'd experience on the Basement of your first Isaac run - or in horror game terms, what you experience in the pre-game cinematics of Silent Hill) that all characters will play the same until you force them to play differently by meagrely changing item preferences.

Dead Estate doesn't necessarily play badly, it just plays it safe and relatively boring. It enjoys the iconography of its influence but not their pathos, and definitely not their systemic complexity. And also, you know what? I don't really want to leave aside the embarrassing and sexist character design - its childish and uncreative, and works perfectly for a game which effaces only that it can show itself off competently as something vaguely familiar but obviously worse.

I think this period of alchemical noodling about in the mechanical limits of the various roguelite 'genres' (which, like, do we consider Skul more of a Spelunky-like or a Rogue Legacy-like or a Roguelite platformer or just an action platformer with roguelite elements? What is the bounding box on procedurally generated levels and perma-death?) is terribly interesting - an atomized collection of devs essentially doing a research project on a scale of a worldwide anarchic autopsy trying to figure out the points in which the skeletal infrastructure of 'necessary' genre conventions can be motivated by disparate, muscular coagulating play. It feels like with that tide, we're moving away from, "what if this genre, but roguelike?" to a more exciting, "what does roguelike framing do to these mechanics?" which is how you get from Slay the Spire to Monster Train to Griftlands - the first is basically a CCG with a loop that lasts 45 minutes and the last is a procedural RPG that does its storytelling through cardplay, contextualized by roguelike elements as minute character arcs, or really, build arcs. However, that grab bag approach loses something that the earlier Frankensteinian smash-this-into-perma-death approach kept closer to chest in its rigidity: the confirmation of mechanical solidity in its original form. Skul fails not due to its ambitions but to how it only loosely ties together the disparate collection its conglomerated under the roguelite horizon; the upgrade trees are weakly procedural and offer no tantalizing upgrade path but merely an assumption that play will hit par; the platforming is minimized because the world architecture needs to suffice for combat platforms as well as traversal, all generated and linked procedurally; the enemy behaviours are simple yet telegraphed inconsistently because the devs needed to make something that was encounterable yet dangerous to too many different Skull approaches; the tacked on "extra" sections are aided not at all by the pick up and play approach because the bite sized play sessions are then rendered inconsistent in what they are saying they deliver. Also, the writing and character design just kind of sucks.

Honestly? I would redirect this to anybody who wants to capture the early Metroidvania flavour outside of the context of encompassing games history instead of Super Metroid. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's better, although it is better, and it definitely doesn't mean it is more original, because there is no world in which ESα exists without it cribbing almost everything from Zebes, but it does, to me, mean that we can articulate a purity of mechanical intercedence into the proceduralistic fashion in which we cohere artistic merit of a game's play with its thematic and visual explicity. In shortest terms, the hostility in ESα comes from a world which feels ruined and hostile, nearly unnavigable, because of the strangeness of the player's relationship with it at the time of introduction; the hubris undertaken to sow weird estrangement from the station to the world outside it is critical and unimpeded by the interfacing, yet eloquent from the delicate situating. In Super Metroid, it's hostile because Samus cannot jump, cannot shoot, and cannot avoid damage due to world design intermediating not at all with the mechanical affordances of play.

So the stated influences of this game, Silent Hill and 30 Flights of Loving, are both games that I love - like, 30 Flights is one of my favourite games of all time, and Brendon Chung is, maybe, one of the best game designers working today, in my opinion. But with what elements and eccentricities emphasized do those game succeed enormously, Paratopic rides the, few, admittedly, foibles that have minorly dragged on the meteoric heights Silent Hill and 30 Flights reach. The art design of Paratopic immures the PSX immersion that only 1999 and the childlike holistically accepting verisimilitude combo could deliver in Silent Hill, but wherein the usage is grand, the actual representation feels meeker and, frankly, sophomoric. The sound design doesn't equally reflect the crystalline impressionism of a poorly wrapped world in comprehensible tinsel, instead sounding like what it is, a VO team that wrote a scary script first and affected scary performances without respect to their reach. In fact, I kind of feel that the nostalgia and referential titillation of media just, you know, older is kind of the driver of the monotony here. The tapes, the 'Friendo', the graphical design - it all smacks of childlike fear of the unknown which is only unknown because of youthful ignorance and not human incapacities. As far as 30 Flights goes, the jarring editing cuts therein works due to the nature of the narrative demanding the oneiric retrospection of a job, and life, decidedly not well lived - as well as informing the player of the broadness of a reality and lived in surreality that weaves more capaciously than Paratopic can manage by cutting across fewer locations with more consistent grounding and firmament. I don't know, it just felt a bit spaced out to me.

2021

The description of 'it's like BotW but with the combat removed' seems to me a brokerage of the funds that we seem to take as an objective, inset currency in gaming without considering their confluence unnatural with the more intrinsically simulating mechanics broadly seen in games generally but open-world games specifically; why, with this understood by a mere moment's consideration, do we not call BotW Sable with combat added? Or Sable an open world exploration game and BotW an open world arcade game? The purity that is so often ascribed to Shigeru Miyamoto's transliteration of his adventuring as a child into the Zelda ethos is not critically understood as an impure alchemy when mixed with the necessary element of a combat loop to insure larger audience appeal by creating further petits win-states (or petits états de mort for the satisfaction angle if you prefer) to firmly emburden a tight gameplay loop. Now, BotW is probably a better game in my opinion than Sable, but I dislike the comparison of Sable as one of those '_______ but _______' games because it disengages with the critical element the community of critics and creators of other mediums have established as forms of representation and innervation in the engagement context we create with our art forms: that each climatological shift in a form is because of a new viewpoint observed by a style - so Sable being a combatless BotW is kind of frusturating, I guess.

I know that people love this game, and sure, being the first to popularize a great many fundamental aspects of game design as we implement them today is worthy of some admiration. But this is one of those games that has the Seinfeld effect that is only increasingly made more obvious in games because of the interactive medium; in television, the effect causes one to go, "this is what all the fuss was about? I've seen this a million times." Whereas in games, the effect is, "Jesus Christ, I can do this in every other game like this, why won't you just do what I want." And that's the way it is with EVERYTHING in Super Metroid: the wonky jumping collision is nowhere as tight as in something like Ori; the breadth and depth of the world is nothing compared to Hollow Knight; the hostility and overbearing wrongness of inhabiting the space is paltry compared to Overwhelm; the combat is finicky and unsatisfying in a way that Death's Gambit's combat never stoops to (even if you compare the fully kitted Samus vs. the starting outfit of Soren); the cleverness of its secrets are dim in comparison to Blasphemous; its artistic cohesiveness is one note and insipid next to Owlboy. There are other examples, and maybe one could make the argument that each of these games satisfy in one way only over Super Metroid, but I think a big thing in games criticism that diverts away from lit crit. or dance crit. is that games have kind of just gotten better: the way we understand our interfacing with them has become more coherent and expressive, the sincerity with which we promote, talk about, and design them has matured, and the limitations we work under with technology in developing them has become freeing as opposed to frustrating (the little room of Jack White as compared to a creative control contract with Phil Spector). I think Super Metroid is admirable, and impressive, and I wish I'd been able to play it at launch so these little burrs weren't caught in my craw due to modern fingers holding the retro controls - but everything it does well can be found done far better in another game and everything it has to teach designers today can be explained more cohesively in a text book than in the game.

It's a long way down, a long way down down down

I think there is definitely a small lack in the critical engagement with Souls influence being the medium through which a reinvestigation of the mechanics established for character action in the PS2 era is now underway in games that are less inspired by the Souls games design than by the developments From Soft allowed to take place in character RPGs. The slowing down of combat, the newer focus on world design as intiated by honing of mechanics with depth as opposed to breadth, and expressionistic play favoured over prescriptive mechanics are all things that the medium is working over in the same way that, after RE and Super Mario 64, designers worked over camera/movement integration within spatial play. That reckoning has just as much to do with the slower pace and decidedly pathos driven storytelling of GoW as does the growth in the storytellers understanding of the character Kratos is in the hands of an older generation of players, and I think if there is anything that Souls influence still can potently do, it's show how mechanics effect more than strict play.

I've heard the criticism that a game in which its mechanical identity is a mar or appendage to the body articulate of the play space is at best laterally integrated and at worst counter drifting levied against The Witness, and while for that game with its puzzles abstracted in the linearity contra expeditionary seamways (which works for me thematically but I get the clash) was a fruitful pasture for the idea of game this/aesthetics that, I think that the Professor Layton series holds a greater degree of oil and water than most puzzle games. The segmentation of play, and the arbitrary construction of the puzzle atmosphere (literally, the forces which probate and negate the solving) seems to me to hinder the narrative architecture in a way that something with the murky mood and abstraction of The Witness, which does have thematic narrative, or even Baba is You, which has allusive thematic impetus, with its deconstruction of the logical indices on which puzzle development from the player side of rupture from coherent wholeness, doesn't present tidily with Layton. I get it's kind of a kids game, and it is much more light hearted than a lot of large puzzle titles - still, puzzles are shortcuts to climaxes, and Layton's devs just don't understand what a 1000 little denouements with no subservience to their place does to the game world's completeness.

Hard to really convey the purpose for or conventional evaluation of Isaac to me now, having put in too many hours over a decade of steady, bite sized play, but I think that, despite countless offshoots and imitators, it is still a vital and vivacious game that has maintained its singularity and persnickitiness amidst the roguelike college.

Maybe it's a bit sacrilegious to say, but this is due for a remake. The assets are fine and live up to an aesthetic that still sits well, the script has almost untouchable bones that, with a better voice cast and meatier dialogue, hold the narrative well, the world architecture is exactly as traversable as it needs to be; but, the combat that was assumed to be necessary at the time in the genre's gestation, the tacked on boss fights at the end, the seemingly arbitrary thematic elements in the puzzles, and the janky, verisimilitude breaking control scheme that makes immersion pretty hard to ingratiate all are relics of the past that squander the real timelessness of Silent Hill 2.