As someone who's played a bit of the OG SRB2 Kart but wasn't an avid player, I had no idea how I would feel about Dr Robotnik's Ring Racers. Frankly, I didn't even know I was gonna be able to play it but as it turns out there's a Mac port. If anything, that gets props from me. I'm seeing a lot of very polarized reviews on here, either 1s or 5s, but I don't think I've ever played more of a 2.5 Star game in my life.

Ring Racers can be best described as maximalist in every way, it does so much, too much even. Sometimes, this is a good thing. The presentation just exudes that Sega Saturn vibe, it's polished to a glowing sheen and looks incredible the whole way through. The song selection is a mix of original tracks and existing remixes and it's immaculate, special mention goes to that Tokyo Active NEETs cameo in the first cup. There's a lot of mechanics and a decent amount of them are fun, even if only in theory. Putting Advance 2's mid-air tricks into a racing game? A ring-based resource management system? There's some neat stuff here. There's also a lot of content, over 200 tracks reportedly, and the ones I've played so far are pretty solid and densely-packed with secret areas and branching paths. With how many unlockables there are, I could definitely see myself coming to Ring Racers every once in a while just to chip away at them.

That being said, for every good idea, moment of brilliance, or genuinely great element, Ring Racers also comes with a lot of bullshit. I know SRB2Kart already kinda felt like bumper cars at times, but man does the pacing of races in this game feel really start-and-stop a lot of the time. It either feels like you're moving too slowly or too fast with little in-between. There are so many mechanics that none of them have any room to breath. Half the stuff you learn in the tutorial are barely used, at least in the early game, and several functions being tied to the same button can make it very easy to misinput. And some of the mechanics are just baffling, why would you add a spin dash, which requires the player to stop in place, to a racing game? Speaking of the tutorial, I'm not the first to say it's way too long and overindulgent, and even after it, there's still a ridiculous amount of insignificant nuances the game never teaches you. Some of the tutorial missions could actually have been fun in a separate challenge mode, but not as a wall barring you from the rest of the game. So much of Ring Racers is locked behind doing other tasks, which feels like such a step-back compared to how SRB2 Kart was so easy to immediately jump into even when you just start playing.

I don't think Ring Racers is bad, it's an obvious labor of love, an impressive technical achievement, and has a decent amount going for it. But I wouldn't say it's good either, it's way too overstuffed and has too much holding it back. For any other fan developers working on a passion project, or really just developers in general, PLEASE try to be mindful of feature creep. Sometimes, it really is better to go simple than let your project balloon into an ginormous mess of good ideas.

A game by absolute freaks, for absolute freaks. If you don't lab kart racers everyday like they're fighting games and try your hardest to complete EVERYTHING in those games, this game is NOT for you.
Almost avant-garde in how little it cares for the casual kart racer audience, forcing you to complete an excruciating tutorial that can take between 30 minutes and 1 hour. To complete one grand prix before you can unlock multiplayer (or use a cheat code). To complete FIVE grand prixes before you can unlock the ability to use old SRB2kart MODS! (or use a cheat code). To stay with one color for your character unless you collect the others, and collect all 82 to unlock time trials. Never has there been a game so obsessed with making players master its mechanics before letting them play with others, as if they were preparing you for real-life war or something.

The game even opens slowly walking you through every option, unlocking each thing in the menu, everything contextualized with Tails and Eggman speaking to you, as Metal Sonic. Clearly, the devs tried to defeat Sonic Robo Blast 2's unnecessarily long intro cutscene, and in their quest for Genesis nostalgiawanking, they made the awful choice of only having the button prompts of the Genesis controller in menus and tutorials, not a huge issue in controller, it is on keyboard, especially because this game just has way too many mechanics and when you finally have to use an obscure one, you gotta press every key or go to the menu to check what key you assigned as the Y Genesis button.

Back to the tutorial, what did they think they were making here, Final Fantasy XVII?? It doesn't even explain things that clearly and there's so much dialogue, no option to reread, just once and trial and error.
It'd be one thing to make a kart racer with a lot of complex mechanics if they all feel cohesive and the races really push you to your limits, like Sonic Riders or even Bomberman Fantasy Race, but I don't think this is it when the mechanics are like 8 different types of boosts, one for each hazard, a charged melee attack? A parry? Two different types of roulettes that by default you have to stop manually???
A lot of this doesn't even come up in the races, it's for the single-player challenges, if it is in the race, you can also probably brute force it and use boost mechanic #54 instead of boost mechanic #301 as originally intended.

There's potential here, but it doesn't feel as good as SRB2kart to be honest. I gave up at the drift section in the tutorial cuz I just couldn't get it to work and the only drift you HAVE to do to proceed is the ultra charged one that gives you max boost #302! If the kart stops moving while you try to drift you instead initiate, you guessed it, another boost mechanic, one that has its own separate dedicated button so why make the drift worse by putting it on that button as well?

I usually don't rank games if I know that they're just not for me or if I played that little, but I don't see how the things I complain about would really do any good to any game in any genre, and even if all players use a save file with everything unlocked, I'll have to stand my ground unless they rework everything.

They tried to make a kart racer with more complex mechanics than Sonic Riders, and thought they had to have THE MOST mechanics to do that. They saw that some Riders players missed mechanics because of the lack of a tutorial and thought they had to overtutorialize EVERYTHING and demanded they mastered the game before even letting them race.
Don't think this will ever catch on and most will probably continue to just play SRB2kart.

Finished my replay of this game on hard mode. There wasn't much of a difference with normal except that obviously you take fewer hits before you go down. Perhaps one day I'll play on realistic but something tells me that will cross the line into being annoying for my playstyle.

If you've followed me for a while or even if you've been in the same room as me for more than 15 minutes you might now that I despise stealth games. I've tried, but I genuinely hate them all. MGS, Thief, Dishonored, even stealth sections in games I like (shenmue, max payne, disaster report 4). I've had bad luck with so called Immersive Sims because of it, as most of them are essentially stealth arpg hybrids like Deus Ex, but so far its basically only the OG (and consortium by virtue of not having stealth) that I mess with. Its not exactly a mystery why, and consider this a plea for other games to follow suit : let me murder everyone. Give me an actual choice between stealth and combat and not just stealth and "you fucked up the stealth you idiot! you might as well reload a save"

Importantly, Deus Ex's combat is deceptively fun to get to grips with. Its so simple but really effective the way that you start out as someone who takes 2 business days to line up a pistol shot to being able to run around with the gep gun blowing people up like nothing. I'm surprised no one else has tried emulating the system, with your RPG esque weapon stats determining how fast your crosshair takes to narrow and become fully accurate, presumably imitating how it takes someone to aim down the sights and prepare to fire a shot.

Now, obviously for this kind of game there has to be push back, and even with a combat build your ass is not going to last if you're trying to play the game like half life, which is precisely why its satisfying to completely forgo stealth and murder everyone through traps, ambushes etc. This playthrough I discovered how useful the non lethal gas grenades are for murder runs (ironically) cause it makes enemies freeze up to rub their eyes, lining up to get headshot with the pistol for maximum murder efficiency.

The playthrough did however highlight Deus Ex's biggest flaw : the save system. Its one of those systems which is simultaneously too annoying and too forgiving. Its annoying because I am forgetful, and losing 15 mins of progress because I forgot to save is just... frustrating. On the other hand, there is basically nothing stopping you from hardcore save scumming every 5 seconds. Ironically, there is nothing more appropriately "mean" for a choice based rpg than an aggressive auto save, as it is, you can basically game most of the big decisions and encounters. Maybe even a save room system like RE4 might be appropriate? Could even lock them behind doors with an interesting weighing up of resources if its worth risking a loss of progress for a lockpick or multitool? Idk now Im playing armchair designer but either way.

Area 51 is still kinda annoying, I didnt use console commands to noclip through it this time but I still fused with Helios because it was the fastest way to complete the level, the later bits of the game are kind of a downgrade from the initial half of the game.

Take “boomer shooter” out of your vocabulary; the term has been rendered meaningless.

I knew this entire little sub-genre of first-person shooters was cooked the second that the joint advertising teams of Games Workshop and Focus Entertainment all came to the conclusion that “boomer shooter” is a marketable enough selling point to tie your multi-million dollar IP to. If, indeed, it ever did mean something, it doesn’t anymore. What a boomer shooter is, in a post-Boltgun world, is “a shooter with pixel graphics”. That’s all. And if that’s all that it was — just a Doom Eternal demake — that would be forgivable. But the reality is that Boltgun is a completely miserable experience made by people who have zero fucking clue what they’re doing, chasing after trends without so much as an inkling of understanding as to why those trends are popular in the first place. Sure, fuck it. The new Doom games are gory shooters. Throwback games made popular by studios like New Blood seem to sell well. All we need to do is put the two together, boom! Free money! Paint it all in space marines and warp and chaos and we’ll be billionaires before breakfast tomorrow. How hard could it be?

I can’t fucking stand Boltgun. For some ungodly reason, someone in charge decided that the best people to put to work on a first-person shooter would be a crack team of board game and strategy developers from Auroch Digital, all of them completely unqualified to get to work on a project such as this. Consider this your first warning sign, long before you even boot up the game; why would Focus hire out to the studio behind Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics and Beermaster: Beer Brewing Simulator to make what’s intended to be a fast, brutal, tightly-paced shooter? Is it because they genuinely believed that these were the best people for the job, or was it because some tiny management-game studio from Bristol wasn’t asking for as much money as the next guys who knew what they were doing? I don’t blame Auroch, necessarily; I know what it’s like to be way in over my head under the guidance of a boss who doesn’t know enough to understand how badly I’m fucking up.

Boltgun is a game of numbers, and not of much else. “Suit your weapon’s strength to an enemy’s toughness rating,” reads one particularly cheery loading screen tip. As requested, I take aim at a Level 3 Nurgling with my STR 5 Boltgun, and the taste of bile in the back of my throat gets harder to ignore. Locking your reticle on an enemy will give you every detail about them you could ever want to know: their name, their level, total health, current health, social security number, bank password, browser history, the works. You swap between the weapons on your hotbar and each of them tells you the exact strength and name of the equipped gun: STR 4 Boltgun, STR 3 Meltagun, STR 7 Plasma Gun. Poke around levels for long enough and you’ll find secret pickups that’ll boost the power of your weapons, adding all sorts of little tags like “Kraken Round Magazine” and “Dragonfire Round Magazine” or “Machine Spirit Upgrade”. Your HUD gets flooded with all of these details, paradoxically taking up so much space on the screen that it’s near-impossible to read any of it. One pressing question remains, throughout all of this:

Why?

What do we gain from having all of this worthless fucking information on the screen at all times? Seriously, what the fuck is the point? I don’t need to know the enemy’s level. I don’t need to know exactly how much health they have. I don’t need to know a numerical value for how strong my weapons are. I don’t need to know what type of ammo I’ve got loaded into my boltgun. I don’t need to know the maximum amount of health that an enemy could theoretically have. I don’t fucking need any of this. How are you getting lapped in your UI design by the original Doom, a game that came out three fucking decades ago and realized then that you didn’t need to tell the player all of this completely fucking worthless information? If you didn’t know before playing that Auroch were strategy game developers and not people who make shooters, this is what gives it away; such a fucking obsession with showing numbers to the player in a situation where they’re worse than useless.

And none of this would matter, really, if the game were fun. If this was all just pointless, ignorable set-dressing for a game that otherwise works fine, then I could forgive it. I can’t, though, because Boltgun commits the mortal sin of being abjectly fucking boring. This might be one of the most pathetically easy games I’ve ever played, even with the difficulty cranked as high as it can go. Enemies feel like they’re shooting at you only as a formality, firing projectiles that move in slow-motion across the screen that’ll land in a different zip code so long as you strafe left. This is true for just about every enemy that can fire something at you. All of them are so sluggish that it’s as if they’re only pulling the trigger at you because they’d get fired and lose their health insurance if they didn’t. The flamers might be one of the most unintentionally hilarious monsters I’ve ever seen in a game like this; I think doctors test for brain activity by whether or not you’ve ever taken a hit from a fireball a flamer has thrown at you. You could only ever get clipped if you were comatose. Exterminatus difficulty does seem to make projectiles go a bit faster, and spawns more numerous and more powerful enemies, but I imagine most people who have played a game before could do most of this in their sleep. Not because they’re god gamers, but because Boltgun never stops drowning the player in goodies.

Pickups are peppered fucking everywhere in all of these over-long levels, littering the floor with every single type of ammo, every single grenade, and more health and armor kits than anyone could ever possibly need. There’s a section on the right side of the screen dedicated to telling you which pickups you got, and you should get used to seeing it be filled with nothing but “Boltgun ammo full, Boltgun ammo full, Heavy bolter ammo full, Krak grenade full, Health full, Health full, Health full, Boltgun ammo full, Plasma gun ammo full, Health full, Heavy bolter ammo full, Shotgun ammo full, Health full”. Outside of Exterminatus difficulty, I don’t think you ever even need to switch weapons; you get so much ammo for every single gun that you’ll never get so much as an opportunity to run a weapon dry. Armor needs to drain to zero before enemies can start dealing direct health damage, and armor caps out at 300(!!!!!), meaning you’ll always have plenty of +100 health kits to backtrack for in the unlikely situation that your foes manage to break through your 300 armor and get to your 200 health. I walked out of every stage with more supplies than I walked into them with, even after certain stages would force me into a minimum of four purges before I was allowed to move on.

In addition to your usually loop of finding color-coded keys and unlocking color-coded doors, Boltgun takes a page from the new Doom titles with the purge mechanic, where all of the doors lock and you aren’t allowed to progress until you’ve killed everything inside. New enemies will constantly spawn in, so it’s mostly just an exercise in strafing around and firing at the teleport particle effects. Enemies spawn in slowly, and the purge arenas are often big enough that you’ll be running around trying to find where the fucking enemies actually are so you can shoot them and progress. A big part of what makes these encounters so slow is that enemies spawn in waves, where more of them refuse to teleport in until you’ve killed everything from the first wave; there’ll be some shit gunner who dies in three shots from the Boltgun meandering around two continents away, and it’s up to you to go and find him so that you can get the momentum going again. There’s no challenge, there’s no pressure, it’s just blindly wandering through these enormous arenas trying to figure out if everyone else went home and didn’t tell you.

A part of me is grateful that this is on Game Pass, because it means that I didn’t need to spend a cent of my own money beyond what I was already paying to find out how atrocious this really is. The other part of me is annoyed, because I never would have bothered trying this out had it not been offered to me as part of a package deal. The only thing it cost me was my time; the one resource I can never get more of. What a complete and utter waste. You know a game is really bad when it ignites the flames of existential dread. There were so many better things I could have done with my time, and I instead allowed this game made and marketed by clueless people to suck it all away and leave me with a taste in my mouth like I ate two servings of dirt. The bar for Warhammer games is on the fucking floor. Do yourself a favor and try to forget that this even exists. I’m sorry for writing this review and reminding you of it if you’d gotten it out of your mind.

I can offer no greater condemnation than by stating that this is a sprite-based game with vertical mouselook.

A victim of its own success.

I'm locking this review in now, because the tides are rapidly shifting for Helldivers 2. It should be no secret that this was a surprise darling that nobody expected to blow up to the scale that it did — least of all Arrowhead. There was some early bumpiness as player counts skyrocketed into the deep hundred-thousands and threatened to crack a million, leaving the servers on life support. Unlike its live-service failbrother PAYDAY 3, Arrowhead got Helldivers 2 sorted within a little more than a week, and managed to win back some good will that had been lost in the chaos. Memes were made, TikToks were shared, everyone got in on the in-universe propaganda, and all was well. It's rare for a game to blow up this much and this rapidly, but word-of-mouth was getting around faster than the plague. Helldivers 2 is a complete runaway success, and represents a very, very big win for Arrowhead after their many years of developing games.

What's unfortunate, then, is that Arrowhead have a strong vision for what Helldivers 2 is and should be. For Arrowhead, Helldivers 2 is a game where you get out of scrapes against bugs and bots by the skin of your teeth. You use every stratagem available to you, you coordinate with your team to make sure there are no blind spots in your composition, you run away when shit gets too hot, you focus on objectives and treat the bonuses as nothing more than bonuses, you get a laugh when your friend shouts "Sweet liberty, my leg!" after you accidentally blast them to kingdom fucking come with an orbital barrage. For the broader playerbase, Helldivers 2 is a game where you play exclusively on Helldive, you only bring the Railgun and the Shield Backpack, you only stand stark still in the middle of a field shooting shit until it's all dead, you only play bug missions, and you're not interested at all in anything that doesn't directly give you medals and slips and super credits. For Arrowhead, the draw of the game is the game; for a lot of players, the draw of the game is filling out the battle pass, and the actual gameplay is just the means to that end.

The latest patch at the time of writing has nerfed the Railgun, which has single-handedly sent the widest parts of the community into a complete and utter Three Mile Island meltdown. It used to blow Charger legs open in two shots on Safe Mode, and now requires about four in Unsafe Mode. That's the extent of it. If that doesn't sound like a big change to you, it's because it isn't. There remain an obscene amount of options available to deal with Chargers — EATs, the Recoilless Rifle, the (buffed) Flamethrower, the Arc Thrower, the Spear, impact grenades, just shooting it in the ass with the heaviest gun you have — but none of that matters, because they want to use the Railgun. And they don't want to use it in Unsafe Mode. And they don't want to run away from Chargers. And they don't want to kite them. And they don't want to dodge the Charger and shoot it from behind. And they don't want to call down a stratagem. And they don't want to blow up its ass while it's aggro'd onto a teammate. They want to shoot them twice with the Railgun. Anything else is "unfun". Go and look at the recent Steam reviews/forum or the subreddit right now, if you're reading this shortly after I've posted it, and you'll see for yourself how everyone is proclaiming this one change to the Railgun to be the abject harbinger of the game's immediate demise.

I don't know who to blame this on, because it seems exceptionally clear that the people complaining the loudest don't seem to have any idea what the fuck they're talking about. I've seen several different posts stating that the Railgun is the only gun that deals with heavy armor, which is blatantly false; these are people trying to adhere to "what's meta" without actually understanding why the gun they're talking about is meta. This is something about live-service games in a more modern context that I cannot fucking stand: everyone is a tier whore. There hasn't been a multiplayer game that's come out in the past ten or so years that didn't have day one articles talking about how there's only one viable loadout and if you're not taking it then you're trolling, or tier list videos put together by popular YouTubers who broadly end up dictating a meta rather than reporting on it, because nobody actually questions why something is thought to be good or bad. This whole phenomenon leaked from Everquest and World of Warcraft like the green shit from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and now every game has to deal with the consequences. The secret of the ooze is that it makes everyone fucking stupid.

"A game for everyone is a game for no one", proudly states the footer of Arrowhead's website. I thought that was an interesting choice of motto, but not just because I agreed with it; Helldivers 2 certainly seemed like one of the most broad-appeal overnight success stories I've ever seen, and I wasn't certain who Arrowhead meant when they said they weren't making games "for everyone". Who was this abstracted "everyone", when everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves? With the way the discourse has been shifting, though, I think it's clear what they mean: Arrowhead has no interest in appealing to people who are playing the game the way that the loudest players complain they can't anymore. These are people who farm the exact same missions the exact same way for hours on end solely to get 100% completion in the battle pass. Why would anyone make games for them? They'd be happier with a piece of paper and some boxes they could fill in. How's that for player expression and a varied meta? You can put a check mark or an X through the box! Make sure to come back every twenty-four hours when your dailies refresh and you can do it all over again on a different piece of paper.

I've been playing on Suicide Mission at a minimum since day one (okay, maybe day three or so), and I've done a fair share of Impossible and Helldive runs, too. They are difficult. I am not surprised that they are difficult because they are the highest difficulty setting available. I have had to improvise, I have had to run away, and I have had to scramble just to barely complete an objective since the moment I started playing the game. At no point did the Railgun — even with a squad of four seasoned players who had come from the first Helldivers, where the difficulty went up to fifteen — allow you to stand your ground and slaughter bugs like a Doom wad. Anyone who attempts to seriously say that they're a Helldive player and that the Railgun nerf has killed their bug-exterminator playstyle is fucking lying. These are players who do not at all know what they're talking about, and they lie about the difficulty that they play on because they think it makes their argument more credible. These people are temporarily-embarrassed god gamers. They think that success and prestige is right there, just barely out of their grasp, if only the devs would allow them to reach it, and all the while they actually belong on the middle difficulties. There's nothing wrong with playing on 5 or 6, or even 1. Play what you enjoy. But don't pretend like you're at a level above where you are when it's obvious to the people who are that you're not. It's sad.

There's a wave rolling in, and I can see the foam at the lip of it from here. We'll have the regular YouTube videos rolling out soon — How Helldivers 2 Failed the Players, Helldivers 2: Dropping the Ball, Arrowhead Studios Gets WOKE and GOES BROKE with Helldivers 2 DISASTER — and leaving players will call themselves "Helldivers refugees" when they find something new to play that they'll hate within a month. What I certainly wish isn't coming is anything resembling an apology or a back-down from Arrowhead. They'll be under a lot of pressure to make changes, and this is the kind of backlash that most companies crumble under. It's been said that players are good at identifying problems and bad and identifying solutions, but I think that's being a bit too generous. I'd argue that the overwhelming majority of players of any game are bad at identifying problems and worse at coming up with solutions. Extremely rarely have I seen a live-service game actually follow through on fan-suggested fixes to fan-suggested problems and not had the game immediately become worse overnight. I hope that they're able to remember their own motto: a game for everyone is a game for no one. Helldivers 2 just got unlucky enough to be branded as a game for everyone.

Anyway, it's pretty good.

I want to preface that all of this may sound very unfair and nitpicky but please let me be flippant, this game is naff. Farming is a game genre that, much like the real-world application, is essentially all about math. I never did homework at school, and I don’t plan to start in my mid-twenties. https://i.imgur.com/P28ClZe.png
Hundred Days is the first victim of my Post-Sakuna: Of Rice & Ruin depression. Sakuna singlehandedly revitalised my interest in the farming genre because it was absolutely radiating in a level of reverence for its chosen craft that I’d otherwise never seen in a game of its kind. It took great strides to make sure that not only does the player have to partake in every step in the ricemaking process by hand, it also hid away much of the controllable and uncontrollable variables that contribute to the quality of the harvest until you finally hit that year-end stat page. It forced me to have a steady hand, examine my environment carefully and learn which cues require which actions to counteract. After handing the player a new tool, it took the time to explain their importance in the overall process, as well as a little of their history; each cog in the cultivation machine is shown to be as important as the other. Greedily, I think I NEEDED all of this to care.

I was hopeful about Hundred Days because it focuses entirely around the art and business of winemaking, to a level seemingly more detailed than Sakuna! The problem is that the very distinct dropoff in reverence to the craft almost hit me like a wet sponge - I’m willing to believe that the developers crafted this game out of genuine interest and passion for winemaking, but absolutely none of that verve made it to the final cut. You’re looking at your vineyard empire from a hot air balloon that only seems to become more distant as your empire expands. The higher up my perspective and scale of my empire got, the less the details mattered, beautiful fields of grapevines slowly camouflaging themselves into mere data points on a spreadsheet. The tutorialisation is as shoddy as the story, I barely knew how to navigate the UI, how to find all of the upgrades let alone know what each of them even did. Many of which are insanely expensive, so you just need to grind away to receive incremental boosts to production. Everything you can click on just brings up a new window filled with fucking numbers and percentages. Fun stuff man. Go outside and touch rice.

The rub is that the game starts with a Stardew Valley-esque “boring office life” introductory sequence, used to introduce the player to the basics of the core gameplay loop. Basically, placing cards with specific functions down onto your field grid. It then sends you to your winemaker’s paradise, an idyllic vineyard somewhere in the Tuscany hills or whatever, before making you do the exact same card-based grind. Guess the message here is that even your life’s dream can become a desk job if you aren't willing to give it some respect.

Harold Halibut is a very technically impressive (when its not bugging out or dropping frames) feat, which unfortunately puts its gorgeous claymation style and cinematography in service of an overwritten, overindulgent miserable slog which might have been refreshing were it a fifth of its length instead of the overbearing wank we got instead.

Wank is the operative word here, the game is spiritually similar to jerking off. It takes inspiration from various sources, wes anderson films chief among them, but from what few films I have seen of those, they were much more entertaining and well written. The sheer nothingness of the gameplay even for narrative focused adventure games and amount of dialogue that was 3 lines too long for what it needed to be really fits together when you learn about the game's 10 year development time. This is someone's baby, presumably a labour of love, but thats the thing, sometimes you need to detach yourself emotionally from your work and cut things when they don't actually add anything. The most damning thing of all, after all that, 8 goddamned hours (it felt twice that) I feel nothing. The game is nothing. I am nothing. We're all nothing. And I have 8 fewer hours now before I return to the nothingness of oblivion with little to show for it.

outside of the (understandably) on-the-nose coloured doorways nearly every instance of environmental interaction is rich and tactile. thirty years later it's still a wonder to grope and paw at every (Possibly Maybe) malleable surface and leverage every new upgrade toward greater structural manipulation and command

in ensuring how and when are given as much significance as what and where it forms a relationship between actor and environment that bears uncommonly personal patterns and markings as you learn to use Your body as an implement to interface with the world. sidepaths and back alleys that carve Under - Over - Through reshape the familiar thru layered mechanical discovery and shift the internal v external dynamic in turn; mastery of the self begetting exponential mastery of the other

a fitting problem then that the biocircuitry, plunging intestinal mazes, and gloomy dark ambient synthesis quickly become less something to endure so much as to dominate; the dissonance for show, and the brutality nakedly glamorous and one sided. so much of it exists in service to the pursuit of (Your) power, kneeling with its neck outstretched waiting to feel bones shatter for Your gratification. sure, I feel obscenely powerful, but I'd rather feel anything else

strange scene it is
every thing in flames