Estimated read time: 6~ minutes.

I have terrible rhythm—I can synchronize, but that's about it—but I love this game. I practically can't beat Rhythm Heaven (might dive into that at some point), but I adore these tours and subpar live recording album-tier covers with completely nonsense maps that make the guitar play the piano, horns, etc.; not because it makes sense but because it's simply fun.

The intro goes incredibly hard. I think it perfectly represents the series as a whole. Even though Guitar Hero III is widely considered the best by a decent margin, I’m partial to II for its crust. Although one very nice feature starting here was they realized people were buying various types of RPTVs and plasmas, so they implemented a calibration screen to make the game playable in the new era of TVs with high latency (40+ms!!).

I’ve always had stage fright, particularly if it ever involved singing. Despite that, I walk through those venue doors, nervous and frankly embarrassed; social anxiety is a bitch. But my love was secretly listening to hard rock, metal, prog rock and metal, maybe a bit of trance here ‘n’ there. I Am here to enjoy some fucking music, meet fellow musicians, and hopefully grow as one.

You know what I found, though?

The fakest fuckers on the planet lamenting about not being popular enough or whatever. "What about me?" What about you? Another cold burnout song about how much everyone else sucks? Wow, how revelatory, you really shook up the scene today. I'm sure we'll quake in our boots at the idea of your sniggering, side-eyeing, nonchalant disregard and elitism leaving the venue and being laid to rest. I just want to play Guitar Hero for God’s sake!

Do you even understand fun? Talking about playing for the music, the esoterica and innate joy of it all, but it sure doesn't seem like it, not unless it's doing literally the same thing you decry the rest of the bands of doing: low effort punk rock with a bit of crass lyrics in there poisoned with irony, but then you make it worse by painting it with the veneer of artistic understanding and passion. Where is it? You seem content to hide it all up in a little heart-shaped box you’ve deemed only your little act worthy of being privy to.
Also, did you really have to do all that at karaoke night? Unplugging the amp and making a speech about it? Telling people they just don't get it and aren't singing for the right reasons? That punk night is dead! Do you even hear yourself? It's just some karaoke; get over yourself.

Go do your own tour or whatever; literally nobody asked you to leave, but I bet you’ll pretend you were kicked to the curb anyways. Showered in praise, yet you hyper-fixate on a couple of dissenters that pop up throughout the year? Who cares! The next set’s about to be played!
You were never here for the music, and it's no wonder you're completely and utterly obsessed with eras you were barely sentient for, or worse, not even around for. You can't get over the fact that time marches forward without you, someone new showing up one day and curb stomping you at your own act; it's humbling, but rather than take it on stride, you grimace, forcing a pained smile as you pat them on the back for performing so well. But it's clear that this was a massive blow to your ego. Maybe you can convince yourself it doesn't hurt so much if you only care about your fellow burnouts quitting emo and declaring the rest of the venue a madhouse.

It hurts, because I thought your act was pretty cool. I guess it’s pretty “punk rock” to jeer and give the cold shoulder though, right? Maybe it’s in spirit, maybe it’s hypocritical of me, whatever.
Throughout my musical journey it’s been nothing but revitalizing, igniting the flame once more for the medium I held so dear. I was berated and constantly mocked for my love of music, especially metal, combined with curve balls left and right, losing loved ones (or what few I would call those), I became very disillusioned with how people behave. It was branching out and stepping out of my comfort zone, keeping my chin up even in the face of pretentious acts that my love for music only grew more. Yeah, it sucked that some of my favorite bands became increasingly misanthropic, but why should that stop me? Why should it stop any of us? It was never about those assholes; it was about the music- their words, not mine. Well, their words until it was just about themselves. I’ll stop now, I’ve got a set to play whether or not people show up. It’ll probably be mediocre! I don’t care.


Punk rock never died. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

Goodnight.

Favorite track: The Sword - Freya

Unrelated music highlight: The Mothers of Invention (Live in London, ‘68)

Play Unabandoned.

A flawed masterpiece, riddled with less than subtle jabs at the drama surrounding it. "Shame! Shame! Shame!"

I had a 1-2k word review for this, but it is unfinished; therefore, this review will be Bojangles4th's B3313 Review 0.9 Abandoned.

Can already hear the clamors of "just separate the art from the artist!!" but that sign section reeked to me. I shrugged it off in ignorance and a desire to continue this experience blind. I did not follow the iceberg stuff, I did not read SM64 creepypastas (though I knew about the majority of the urban legends predating the mass-writing exercise fabrication process in 2020), and the BOO

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Unfortunate, as exploring this game is utterly magical to me but I can't in good faith ever recommend [REDACTED]

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I forgot what I was going to say. Might as well mark the review as finished (abandoned). This is you (the reader's) fault.


This is Bojangles4th's B3313 1.0 (Official) review, version 0.9 (Abandoned)

GET ME OUT!!
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Romhacking page for B3313 Unabandoned: https://romhacking.com/hack/b3313-unabandoned
BL page for it: https://www.backloggd.com/games/b3313-unabandoned/

Music highlight. Tim Follin, you can't save this. I can promise though, I sunk a good few hours in because the OST is great.

Really telling that this is sitting at a cool 6/10 despite most people likely never figuring out what the potions did (essential) or how to jump-grab or drop-jump. Not a single mention of the nearly frame-perfect waiting sections with oscillating spike-balls, the spawn-in death traps, or the borderline item softlock (I elaborate on this one in the description)

I'm a Zelda II defender (4/10) and I love Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! (8/10) for its masterfully tight design and satisfyingly brutal difficulty, but every other chamber in Solstice by comparison is full of "gotchas" and absurdly tight windows that are made worse by the isometric view obfuscating their actual location. You can infer a lot of locational stuff, but only so much; there's a reason platformers nearly entirely avoided this perspective even back in the day, opting for either top-down or side-view.

I can't help but feel like you're better off playing one of the adventure games of the 80s and 90s instead if you want a "vibes-based exercise in trial and error."

Indie GOTY 2024 Nominee

"Insanely addictive." -GameSpot
"Finally, my two favorite pastimes, roguelites and poker, reunited in one revolutionary hybrid." -IGN
"Thank god this doesn't cost me any real money, my wife said she'd leave me over what happened in Vegas. Oh shoot, it's 3AM..." -GiantBomb
"As a Zynga Poker fan, this is what I wished they would've done 10 years ago; excellent timewaster." -RockPaperShotgun
"Update: My wife left me, but I just got this sick tarot card." -GiantBomb

Music highlight: Tarot, Spell of Iron, "Things That Crawl At Night", 1986. (unrelated)

Music highlight. Estimated read time: 3~ minutes for OpenRCT2, 3~ minutes for venting. lol.

"Do I put my review on RollerCoaster Tycoon 1 or RollerCoaster Tycoon 2? And which version..." I don't know why I fretted over this when I played the entirety of both base games via OpenRCT2. It's also with this that I break my oldest "running gag" (implying it's funny) with this account, which is that I'm always playing RollerCoaster Tycoon 2; by unmarking it as "playing" and replacing that status with this. More on this later.

I could gush endlessly about RollerCoaster Tycoon 1 & 2; they're in my mind the best jumping-off point for getting into management games, which in turn would make the entry into things like RTS easier for many. They're not without their flaws, though; I'll knock those out immediately. The most obvious one is that many things aren't explained to the player, but 95% of the time they are shown; the remaining 5% can ruin your scenario play, though, such as guest weight or ride requirements to avoid stat penalties... wait, hold on, don't go anywhere, I know that sounded like nerd shit... okay, it kind of is, but it's not that involved, I swear. "Learning" these games is incredibly easy if you observe interactions; though one plugin/mod I see people use is automatic price manager, and I personally think it takes a lot out of the game; you can find out how much you can sell something for by simply raising the price until people stop buying, or the inverse by lowering until people start buying. I mention this interaction specifically because this is how most things go with the game; if you're not sure, just do something and observe; it's not a particularly obtuse game except in some edge cases. That said, I'll recommend some very basic plugins for OpenRCT2 that help immensely with onboarding; they do not make the game easier, they just integrate relevant information that you would be wiki diving for in the first place.

Where these games shine is in the sheer player expression they allow for completing the scenarios, or in ride recreation, or scenery/decor, just general theming. The scenario difficulty scales fairly linearly in RCT1 with enough wiggle room to allow most players to not only learn but also express themselves (reasonably; don't spam too much or you'll go broke!). RCT2 had the problem of inexplicably ordering scenarios within each difficulty category alphabetically, meaning for many, they had an arduous first scenario in the form of Crazy Castle, which more experienced players almost unanimously agree should’ve been placed in Intermediate rather than Beginner anyways. OpenRCT2 now defaults to a difficulty sorting for RCT2's scenarios I believe, which essentially everyone recommends. Of course, this is mostly irrelevant if you played one or the other to completion and then started on the others' scenarios, as you'd already be accustomed to it, but it's yet another tweak OpenRCT2 makes that improves the experience for everyone.

...

"More on this later.": There is a weird fetishism from the more.. "niche" side of game review/criticism/analysis, a patriotic sense of obligation and pride in always playing, reviewing, and talking about The Original Version of something, often knowing full well that better versions of the game exist, and to not just make it a matter of preference but to actively disregard or dissuade playing games or such projects. To a degree, I felt this rub off on me from about 2015-2018 when I started collecting retro consoles like the PlayStation 3 and my dozens-long list of CRTs (essay on this some other time)
This isn't wholly unjustified, however, as for years and still going, many gamers will wholesale write off anything older than them as being outdated and not worth playing. In the case of OpenRCT2 all it really does is make the game playable on modern operating systems with the utmost basic quality-of-life changes (such as raising and lowering single tile placements without having to adjust the terrain first; things people far more into the game back in the day would enable tile editor for anyways, or one more significant, immensely helpful thing; but I'll let you see if you can figure out what that is in my playthrough of Micro Park. (timestamped to nudge you closer to it)

Somewhere along the way, I feel like the relatively young medium of video games skipped from being underbaked to overcooked in their analyses; a lack of brevity and/or concision, often over-analyzing every minute gameplay interaction for seemingly no reason other than to point out that they notice these things exist. It really shouldn't be warranted as a baseline component to a review unless you're clarifying something in active debate; most of it comes off as petulant bickering for little reason other than wilful disengagement.
To make matters worse, it's often coated with almost twice as much wordage trying to justify its position in the first place, as if the opinion piece of a cold, pessimistic burnout─the alphabet soup concocted in a flurry with more passion than any second given to the actual piece being discussed─ever needed one to begin with. It's just an opinion, after all. But maybe that's what's most upsetting from that perspective? That it is just that, and even if influential to a degree most can only dream of, still ultimately means little towards swaying the perception of the object of discussion.

O hypocrite that I am, for herein lies borderline word salad lamenting such an angle in the first place; oh well. It all wraps around to being fetishistic about things deemed historically significant, assigning them prestige and sacrality to be both immune from criticism and ammunition against that which deviates even a little.
Perhaps a more concentrated example is the inconsistency in perception around Minecraft (2009), specifically ""old"" Minecraft, where a very loud minority decry the game as having fallen off, being altered too much, etc.; the inconsistency of when it fell off would be hilarious if it weren't so depressing and laden with real-time demonstrations of parroting and a density of nostalgia bias so immense it makes Ocarina of Time look like a contrarian's pick. A defense of the old does not need to be propped up with slander of the new; that's just conservatism for video game art hoes.

Video games died in 1999, they'll say, which is news to me, but if that's true, then I'm pretty happy playing whatever this software is called from 2002, 2012, and 2022 as well.


Where to buy RollerCoaster Tycoon 1: GOG or Steam
Where to buy RollerCoaster Tycoon 2: GOG or Steam
OpenRCT2 project, for playing the games on modern operating systems: OpenRCT2
Launcher/updater for OpenRCT2/OpenLoco: OpenLauncher
Recommended OpenRCT2 plugins: Stat Requirement Checklist, Live Ride Measurements, Park Rating Inspector.

In the unholy hours of 2-4AM, the snowstorm finally started to subside, leaving only the howling winds, soakingly humid and blistering at -29C/-20F, and about 1m/3ft of both powdery and wet snow covering 100m^2.

The only thing more numb than my hands was my mind, hardly a spark left to even be upset about the record-setting blizzard; but something else was there that had compelled me to wait so late into the night, logically I saved my energy for when the storm died down, but that was half of the truth. I didn't know what the other half was, and I still am uncertain. But I shoveled nearly all of it by myself, alone with my thoughts, the chorus of winter sweeping across the ice, and the very real threat of frostbite as I lose feeling past my wrists; only assured that they're okay because they weren't in pain and they still moved.

Then, after the front of the house was 3/4 cleared, at 3:30~AM, everything fell silent. The wind in the immediate area stopped, snow wasn't falling, nature held its tongue as the ice sat upon its throne. A courtyard I was never invited to, in which my presence felt actively unwelcome on a fundamental level, a place that I persisted through and rearranged for myself.
A primordial, humbling feeling of insignificance washed over me as the sigh of winter pushed us to the brink, that the only reason we had anything for it was due to the time we were born in, having the technology to forecast; but dangerous when the plow you rely on spontaneously broke down the week prior.

I would have cried at a time I'd forgotten how to, had I not known better to protect my face from frostbite. It was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.

"A young bunny dreamt of a cold, open expanse, blanketed with white snow the color of their fur. It was night and the stars sung beautifully across the faint blue dusk. The bunny was the most alive in this place."

Music highlight. Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes.

Video games aren't fun anymore.

Minecraft was at its best in whichever version came after the first one I played, because that was my First Update and was new and exciting to me.

I will talk about the game peaking in its beta while also expressing pure insipidity as soon as the ender dragon is found and/or killed, despite the fact that this did not exist during the supposed Golden Age of Minecraft.

Microsoft ruined Minecraft by making it accessible across 8 distinct platforms and keeping the simpler combat that I insist is better than

Mojang, who ruined Minecraft with the Beta 1.3 with the Beta 1.4 with the Beta 1.8 with the Release 1.0 with the Release 1.3 with the Release 1.5 with the Release 1.6 with the Release 1.9 update. Oh, the train stopped? Just kidding, with the Release 1.13 with the Release 1.14 with the Release 1.16 with the Release 1.17 with the Release 1.18 with the Release 1.19 with the Release 1.20 update. Yes, every single one of these updates spread across the last literal decade individually ruined Minecraft. Oh sorry, I forgot to start the timeline at Infdev

Yes, I can list at least one reason for every update charted out above. I will use however much or however little knowledge I have of Minecraft to relentlessly batter these algorithm-oriented talking points inside my head as I play, so I can reinforce the growing status quo to garner clicks and views all built around a narrative of disinterest, creative bankruptcy and an inability to keep the intrinsic flame alight.

A sandbox, that contains things I am not forced to engage with, but will make it my problem despite the game letting me choose my version to play on. They made the game too easy, they made the game too hard. They made the game too directed, they made the game too wide. They changed too much, they changed too little. Vanilla is boring, modders can do better. Mods are too different, I prefer Vanilla.

Minecraft 45 Bugs Compilation is ruining minecraft, how haven't Mojang fixed this yet? Minecraft 45 Bugs Compilation (2012) is funny, can't wait to try this on my creative world. Minecraft was better when it was simpler and we'd make 8-bit calculators out of only redstone and torches.

Minecraft grew up, I did not. I grew up, Minecraft did not.

...

How do I live like this? I don't. Imagine being this miserable. I love Minecraft just as much today as I did over a decade ago. Dipped my feet into mods, played dozens of adventure maps, was there at the twin-birth of Battle Royale (Survival Games in MC + the mod for Arma II) and here to see the entirety of Shrek at 720p encoded as block placements in-game.

"Video games aren't fun anymore." get real. Love the gang that plays Minecraft with me who still have a sense of humor, imagination and intrinsic motivation to simply build together.

Good night.

How to host a java server: PaperMC + server flags
How to manage Minecraft Java installs: Prism Launcher (recommended) or MultiMC
How to install mods: Modrinth
Wiki/further reading: Minecraft Wiki (not fandom)

Sacrifices genuinely great level design for what's essentially unfailable courses (outside of the extremely jank boss and trick courses), the soundtrack is also a massive step down over the original. There's almost zero sense of item management anymore as you're able to churn out 200+ on every jump (items still cost 100)

Genuinely don't get why this one gets gassed up so much more than the original, it's inarguably a shallower singleplayer experience for a slightly better multiplayer one (debatably worse though as the new tech the game introduces would make the gap even wider than anything the first game could've come up with (reflecting) )

Nearly completely sanded off of all edges that made this unique to learn, but I guess in the process that makes this more "palatable" as a multiplayer experience. Really I'm just tilted at how much of a downgrade this is over the original presentation-wise, they replaced the kids yelling "POINT" and "GO!!" and such with a generic stadium style announcer and most of the music sounds like an approximation of "good N64 music" vs the original's absolutely "going ham on the keyboard" that was so good it made the game go 6 for 6 on people assuming the og was a PS1 game rather than N64 when I streamed it.

CW: Depictions of extreme acts of violence towards children, suicide, mentions of sexual assault, gore.

Estimated read time: 10~ minutes.

We (Laika) hear from our daughter (Puppy) over the radio that cousin Poochie, her best friend, has been crucified with his own guts by The Birds. No more than a minute later or so, we see cousin Poochie, as described.

Fuck.

...Now our friend Jakob is going after The Birds for revenge, what a fucking idiot. A total suicide mission. Fuck. Gotta catch up to him.

Fuck.

That's the very start, the intro. Yes, the content warning precedes this too in-game (I merely added the gore warning, though that should be obvious if you saw the trailer); I thought about expanding it even more, honestly, but I feel that would be spoilery. Anything more than explicitly labeled in the CW is never on-screen anyways, but at a few key moments it made me choke up.

Laika: Aged Through Blood really doesn't hold any punches, save maybe one, but it's the difference between dealing with extremely heavy themes and piling on so many that nobody's going to touch your game. I still think for many the game is too much to deal with, when the barometer for "heavy" content to most consumers of media is "saying goodbye to a friend" or "maybe we question why we shoot people sometimes".

Mechanically it similarly doesn't really hold many punches, sort of, it's a rather demanding game while also being extremely unique to actually play. It's ultimately a fusion of sidescrolling driving with twin-stick shooting, emphasis on momentum and careful angling; weirdly precise aiming, though with a somewhat generous aim assist, which feels weird at first but after a bit I stopped thinking about how it works. I'd say after my second real boss the game's general movement also truly clicked with me, and in that regard it's one of the most satisfying games I've ever played to perform well at, it just looks so sick when you pull off weapon swapping to deal with a whole group of enemies in the span of one jump, calculating your target priority and executing on it... It's the balance game designers toil with endlessly and it's something I feel Laika: ATB more or less nails immediately, with only occasional hiccups in some awkward encounter design. The bosses themselves are frankly kind of whatever, but thematically they all kinda nail it. It has what I could only compare to "bloodstains" in the form of "viscera sacks", whereupon dying to an enemy or falling off your bike (falling into a death pit or similar doesn't drop one.
It's worth mentioning that I think a certain boss in particular is easily the worst part of the game, about halfway through, lol; got stuck there for an hour+ but when I beat it I felt like I could take on the rest of the game without any real troubles.

And that soundtrack... God, the soundtrack... I know for many they'll find the lyrics insufferable; a lot of people don't even like having em for credits sequences, and normally I'd say "SAME!"; but you know what? I love the OST. It makes it feel so much more grounded, the mixing is wonderful too, can hear the actual slaps on drums, or the breathing; just very organic ya know? The way you acquire tapes as you progress through the game also seems fitting relative to the location they're found in for the most part, not all of them hit but most are bangers.

Major spoilers from this point on, until closing thoughts.

"Fuck me if I care."

Getting to this point in the game struck my heart with a twinge of pain, if you know you know. I gush about the game mechanically but for me it's the symbolism and pure vent energy behind everything. Laika's angry, I'm angry. Laika's sad, I'm sad. Some friends you know you'll be seeing for the last time. Other things are more systemic. Sometimes you're given a choice, one that likely would do nothing for the long run, yet immediately after I felt genuinely awful for acting in anger during Closure; I felt as though I'd failed my own moral compass, because I was immersed in Laika's suffering, her anger, her tug of war between apathy and empathy. I let apathy win once and felt like shit. I need to clarify the game never forced me to. More on this later.

There is a revelatory moment late into the game that explains a very specific enemy behavior that confused me and other people: The birds who don't attack, that's not a bug. It's deliberate. They are effectively committing suicide in protest of the war, feigning their positions as much as possible and willingly being mowed down to fulfill their own moral and philosophical code, even after we desecrate their religious and cultural center in revenge of Poochie; because they leave their long history behind as it's been repurposed as the heart of a new eugenics advocacy and research program. Sounds familiar...
Also, at the religious center, the person who's the only reason we're able to get in isn't a bird, but someone who willingly became a slave to them so she could get closer to their most treasured history; as an archeologist and historian, to her it was worth it. After helping us demolish all of it, we find her having hung herself in guilt of destroying her passion. She did it for what in her eyes was a righteous mission, but the weight of destroying culture was too much to bear.

At one point, Puppy asks her mother if she'll be like her one day, Laika responds by recounting her experience inheriting the curse. She explains that it is hereditary, that her body felt like death, eating itself from the inside out and like being on fire, until she bled out; her memories played back instantaneously as she revived, taking the curse away from her mother and into her. Puppy doesn't seem too phased by all of this, but also says little.
Later it is revealed Laika has lost two daughters who bled to the curse but failed to actually survive the process, thus permanently dying; all this Laika omitted telling Puppy, whom she didn't try to become too attached to for fear of experiencing the same pain all over again. In a subquest, we follow Laika go through PTSD of one of these deaths. It is revealed later the curse is not exclusive to Laika's family; the foreigner at the bar, upon finally figuring out what she's saying, talks of her own home, how there existed a woman with the same curse of immortality. She bled too, but rather than become a pawn for her village, she threw herself off a cliff, and the body was never found.

The big thing here is that the curse, reviled by the carrier, is sought after by those looking to turn them into permanent soldiers. The birds who are adamant about eugenics want to abduct one with the curse to study it, in hopes of becoming immortal themselves. This culminates in Herman taking Puppy out to hand her off to someone, to get rid of what he considers a target to the village. We confront him at the bar, detailing excruciating torture that will be inflicted if he does not reveal where our daughter is. After he tells us he handed her off to someone at the bird city, we dome him, then head off after Puppy.
We track them down to a bar, where the "someone" is a singer who we confront with a shot to the liver; we explain they'll be dead in minutes if they don't explain where Puppy is. They explain they gave Puppy to a bird named Trook, who was going to use her as his Ticket to Heaven. We shoot the singer as well, before heading off to find Trook and Puppy. We find Trook in a dumpy little hideout with Puppy who's tied up on a bed, and we try to barter with him, explaining that Puppy does not actually have the curse, and that we will literally kill ourselves to give him some blood if he lets her go. He considers it for a moment, hesitating, then says he doesn't trust us, and begins pulling his gun out on Puppy; but we intercept this and dome him immediately, rescuing Puppy and taking her home.

(CW for paragraph: rape)
While out in the world I noticed some new NPCs about halfway or two-thirds through the game, one of which was this older man asking for us to return his young daughter home. By this point I was pretty set on doing all of the sidequests, so we tracked her down to Where the Waves Die. There we find her corpse, and her diary. The birds killed her on-sight, and the diary, quite unusually from most other items in the game, is not read back to us directly by Laika; she simply remarks. "Fuck... I wish I could un-read that."
When we return to the man to tell him the news, and confront him about what's in the diary, he plays dumb; we press him further, and he cracks, simply saying that "she was the only love in my life." It's heavily implied that the man was molesting and raping his own daughter. The sidequest is completed, and, much to my surprise, you can execute the man on the spot with no punishment. Fuck him.

"More on this later": Poochie's killer turned out to be a child soldier not much older than Poochie, who did so in rage after ceaseless mockery and abuse from his fellow soldiers; given the title "Kidgutter". In Closure, we find him wallowing in an abandoned warehouse, slowly starving himself to death in guilt and all but asking us to kill him. I hesitated, but only briefly, before pulling the trigger. I sat there for a while thinking about what I'd done, the quest was completed already before that; I never had to pull the trigger. Would Laika have pulled the trigger? I thought so in that moment, but when I became unsure, I felt genuine guilt and not the kind that's easier to answer past an "I don't know". I think the action were automated, Laika "could" have, but given the option not to, I have a feeling she'd find it in her somewhere to spare him. To have him starve to death instead? Maybe, or maybe she'd set him down a path of redemption as an ally to help bring an end to it all. I don't know. I'm sorry.

...

In the finale of the game, we learn that the Ticket to Heaven was to go to the new bird city that flies in the sky nearly perpetually, and work with an inside agent who opposes the bird regime. We board the flying city, and with their help, continue to shut down critical components that let the city thrive, and we confront their leader, a pure totalitarian dictator literally referred to as the Two-Beak God. After a straightforward battle, we defeat him, but the birds in a last ditch effort to commemorate their leader follow through with dropping "The Egg", the second nuke. We immediately dive after it, while getting calls from Puppy who is sick; her body about to be bled, the curse is taking its toll on her, all while we skydive chasing after this bomb in an attempt to save the world. More and more birds fall after us, diving to their own deaths for the sake of fulfilling their leader's vision in an attempt to stop us, but we keep going. Puppy radios back, informing Laika that she has bled, and lived, and has the curse now.

That's.. great, Puppy...

And with tears welling up, we take one last shot into the bomb, destroying it mid-air and being engulfed in flames, along with the destruction of the city-regime.

Fuck.

Closing thoughts.

Laika: Aged Through Blood, while I think rough structurally (gameplay-wise), is an unbelievably poignant allegory for womanhood, specifically the systemic mistreatment of it; the entire "curse" is the game's namesake, to be aged through blood, as that marks the end of being a girl and the beginning of being a woman, sought after to produce an ideal offspring, or more pawns for war, or simply glorified servitude in the house; completely disregarding the person of the woman and dehumanizing her as much as possible into her utilitarian and traditional role extremes. The entire game feels like a vent piece, soundtrack and all, and my lord it feels utterly cathartic to me; it rides a line that I appreciate a lot more compared to most "Art Games" that love beating you over the head very literally and directly with what their message is, though those have a place in my favorites as well. I cried.

In a word: Mother.

Favorite tracks:
Mother
The Last Tear
My Destiny
Lonely Mountain
Trust Them
(main menu)
(whole album's on Spotify btw)

The presentation of Tunic is unassuming, initially looking like yet another flat-stylized medium-sized indie game (see: VR games), but slowly I realized that it's not "just another", but is extremely intricately designed where every little detail that does exist does matter. It's masterful in art direction and sound design, quickly rolling its way into my favorite soundtracks as well.

I'll split gameplay up into two distinct sections here as many do, but I want to clarify now that this is as deliberate from me as it is from the game.

Combat-wise it's somewhere between any Zelda or Souls, feeling more like the former with some mechanics of the latter (stamina management etc.); actual encounter design is pretty firmly in the middle, at first feeling very much akin to something like Link's Awakening but evolving into something a bit meaner and a lot more thoughtful like Dark Souls or Elden Ring. (further elaboration in log notes, those will contain outright spoilers for mechanics just forewarning) This is one thing I've seen begroaned fairly often and I just don't get why? It's honestly pretty solid and opens up a lot as the game keeps going, though by the back half it then becomes kind of irrelevant; which, not to sound all "just trust me" but it becoming basically irrelevant is not at all a bad thing, it's just not the focus anymore, and I'd be willing to bet it was a deliberate metanarrative decision to reinforce this next segment. Before that though, worth noting that somewhat recently(?) they added better accessibility options in regards to difficulty; before it was basically default or god mode, but I think 2D Zelda fans refusing to level with Tunic will be happy they got their wish with the infinite stamina option. (In all seriousness, settings like these are great)

If you look at my log dates, you'll see I started Tunic over a year prior to what I'd consider my actual playthrough from Nov. 12th-16th, because frankly I find most puzzle games to be daunting. Not because I think I'm incapable of solving them, I eventually will for most things aimed at general audiences, but because I can never really escape feeling anxious around them. Tunic was different though, its navigational puzzles were always welcoming to get into and felt like natural evolutions. But I knew there was more, the entire language (which is no mere alphabet swap), the drip feeding of some key word info. Truthfully, I had hints at about 4 points, but like 3 of those were me somehow missing a manual page in plain sight like 10 hours ago and a friend chiming in where it was. I felt very out of my depth at the beginning, but once things started to click, it kept rolling and was exciting; frustrating at times, but nothing some deep breaths and short breaks didn't bring me back around to fixing.

My favorite part of the game though, enough to make stingy ol' me want to break a habit or beg for a bday present, is the in-game manual. The manual is an absolute masterstroke of game design and I refuse to elaborate further. I cannot stress how utterly incredible it is, made with such care by itself that most games blush at the task of detailing something so much while also giving it so much purpose. I wish I had a physical copy of the manual.

And now we reach the point where I feel talking about things much further would be too spoilery, and I had to keep things vague in other areas I normally wouldn't like doing in so as not to ruin the mystique entirely. Maybe just an excuse, I don't know; I feel Tunic deserves more words, though. It has this absolutely unparalleled sense of exploration and discovery, which will likely take even the most experienced puzzle game enjoyers by surprise. Barring only a couple puzzles that lack even a clue to their solution aside from "that one thing you forgot you could try 10 hours ago", the rest of them hit it out of the park and the game punched surprisingly well thematically for me.

One last thing, HLTB clocking in "12 hours" makes me mad and people who've completed the game will know why... They will never experience transcendence...

In one word: Knowledge.

Favorite tracks (3 hour long album btw, awesome.)
Redwood Colonnade
This Is The Wrong Way
Crouch Walker
Snowmelt
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<major spoiler>

"Hmm? Ah, hello there. Come down to explore these beautiful old ruins? Don't mind me.
I've a fondness for exploring myself. Getting lost and finding your way again is a pleasure like no other. We're exquisitely lucky, you and I." ❤️

Throughout my journey in Hallownest it felt as though a timetraveler went back to write the game to specifically mock me at several points, to terrify and sadden me at others; something I can't say I expected to feel from Hollow Knight, but the game has multiple moments instilling every type of emotion in me within a world so full of death with life that persists in decay. There's a nearly overwhelming sense of melancholy to nearly everyone and how they conduct themselves, but they all handle it differently. Some seem blissfully unaware, but even the seemingly arrogant and naive Zote has a deeper motivation buried in his being beyond fame and glory.
I simply adore the writing and attention to detail, Elderbug at the beginning of the game for example has 3 different greetings depending on if: 1) you greet him immediately, 2) you walk past him and come back, or 3) you walk past him, enter the well, then come back. He's far from the only example of this, the game is utterly chock full of flavor text and worldbuilding in such an unobtrusive way that I'd wager the casual gamer who isn't an autist like me who tries to exhaust every dialogue exchange will end up missing 2/3 of it. I find that absolutely incredible, and as far as any game goes I've only seen this level of care put into every minute detail rivaled by Supergiant's Hades.

Mechanically speaking this is perhaps the simplest part to talk about, but let me get it out of the way: The start is SLOW. Like, REALLY slow. It's not the slowest I've ever played but it's almost zen-like in its pacing for the first few hours until you find the dash ability and not too long after the walljump. Everything else is anything but slow though, for what I can only describe as MegaMan X/NES platformer kind of movement where your momentum is (practically) fixed pace and jump height is dictated extremely granularly by how long you hold the jump button. The act of exploration, uncovering more of the map, finding new or recurring characters is always exciting; it's a little bewildering just how massive the map is yet it's navigable with a fairly sparse quick travel system.
One system I'd like to highlight in particular though because it seems to be a weird point of contention is the Shade. Upon death, you leave a "Shade", which contains all of the Geo (the game's currency) you had on your person similar to bloodstains in the Souls games; difference here is you must attack it to absorb it. Again, similarly, if you die before doing so that money is just gone. I've seen a number of people complain about this but despite losing nearly 2k(!!) at one point it never really bothered me, because secretly this game keeps handing out items you can sell for 200, 400, 800, even 1000 geo to a vendor you meet at the halfway point (when geo starts to become relevant at all). I personally do not understand the frustration with this system, it's far less important than in something like Dark Souls which I know y'all love and the game periodically hands out a way to bypass having to manually collect it anyways (once per use, but by the end of the game I had 15~ of these lol). It incentivizes me to think about how I'm picking my wallet back up once in a while which is more than I can say about mashing X (Sony) while sprinting over a funny puddle. Even Zote knows better.
The combat is snappy and tight, very clearly designed around the instantaneous or otherwise fixed-distance movements; in a similar vein of dismissiveness I see nobody mentioning how you can adjust your playstyle dramatically through the use of Charms, if you want to be a spell-spamming glass cannon there's nothing stopping you and it's perfectly viable. Bosses are almost all excellent, with the finale being one of my favorite in any video game. (spoilers) "GIT GUD!"

Artistically probably one of my all-time favorites, in every department. I will say though, I became progressively upset in the latter half with each new area I found--BECAUSE Y'ALL KEPT TELLING ME THEY LOOKED THE SAME?? THEY LITERALLY DON'T?! THEY'RE DIVERSE AND BEAUTIFUL IN BOTH TRADITIONAL AND HAUNTING WAYS??? Seriously what the fuck!!! Game has a callout for this seemingly LOL
Real talk though it's incredble how cohesive the art direction is while still maintaining clear identities of each region. I have no problem distinguishing, without opening the full map, (minor spoilers start) that I'm at for example Greenpath, Fungal Waste, or Fog Canyon (minor spoilers end) despite these looking vaguely similar and all in approximately the same area. I also have no problem distinguishing the "edges" (no way to be more specific without giving away one of the coolest parts of the entire game imo). On a far more personal level I adore the character designs for the sole reason that they are simple yet extremely identifiable, which makes them encouraging to want to draw myself!

I want to put in so many different quotes from the residents of Hallownest, but if I put in the ones I "liked" I could fill out three more of these reviews. I opened with the one I did because I think it most accurately reflects my main joy in the game, or tied at least; I also just think that the game brilliantly shows all the different outlooks on the same circumstances people can have. My depression is not the same as yours, we have different struggles even if we potentially have the same trauma. It's as confounding as it is beautiful, right? Maybe... I don't know how to eloquently close that. The music and art and writing all come together to aid in that perfectly. I could have ended my playthrough 15~ hours earlier than I did, but I chose to delve deeper into the game and that only made it better as I learned more about each characters, their plights, their relationships and bringing the gay couple together.

In a world a world where every AAA studio is racing to see who can fit the most absurd amount of filler sidequests per dollar, even going so far as to start pondering the use of rancid A.I. tools to inflate this even more, (archive link), it's hard to see Hollow Knight as anything less than incredible.

One more.

“In every heart, there is nobility. Proof of this lies before us, dormant within you, when you’re blinded… but only by its grace may you ascend to that plain where truth and essence lie.”

...One more.

“Are we not all just wandering souls in search of purpose? To find meaning in this vast existence… It is the greatest quest of all.”

...Just one more.

“To protect the weak, that is this kingdom’s last and only wish. Where life might have ended, hope has remained.”

...

“Maybe dreams aren’t such a bad thing after all.”

In one word: Remain.

Favorite track from the OST

It's like Duck Game (good) and Gang Beasts (mediocre) had a baby (unholy)

One notch removed from the most cynical Twitch-core party game slop imagineable, the whole stick figure thing barely being utilized to any effect that could at least harken back to their origins (no blood or gore whatsoever, no dismemberment); just extremely toothless.

I grew up with the very flash games this is trying to point towards, but they're (almost) all better games or at least with more personality than procedurally-generated gamer terms in the year 2017.
The controls are also weirdly awkward, you CAN just play this with only a dpad and 2 buttons but ideally you use both sticks and all actions on shoulders, since you can aim weapons with right stick.

But hey "it's only $2 tho" "you can join mid-game" "it requires zero thinking to play", it sure does.

I must confess, I have not actually played THPS1 or THPS2 in their original incarnations (loud booing.wav) yeah I know, FAKE FAN!! But listen, hear me out, <even louder revert noises.> Yeah, didn't think you had an answer to that.

Every once in a blue moon I boot THPS3 up for various reasons, whether for a bit of nostalgia escapism (something I normally strongly avoid doing bcus I believe it to be unhealthy), or to simply refresh myself on one of the tightest series of games ever made at their peak.
Everyone's got a different favorite in these, but most agree 3 is the best (on a mechanical level) to play long-term; even over something like the relatively recent 1+2 remake, because while those levels are iconic for bringing skateboarding back into public consciousness and largely credited even for skateboarding having a place today at the Olympics, 3 is where they'd perfect the series mechanically. In the documentary "Pretending I'm a Superman", Tony Hawk mostly talks about THPS1 and THPS3, because while 2 was the gangbusters critical darling and the natural evolution of the surprising smash hit of THPS1, they somehow did it again with THPS3, and there he talks about leaning into a more arcadey approach (not that the previous titles weren't, but this basically triples the length of your average combo).

Something I think is lost in THPS1+2 is the readability of stages. Don't get me wrong, it certainly has presentation still and I'd argue it's decent, but the choice to use very heavy baked in lighting and drop shadows clashes with the direction of these games. Multiple times I was left scouring maps looking for a random circle on a wall because it blends into the shadows; this was never a problem in THPS1 through 4 except maybe finding the skate decks on maps with dark ceilings.

I'm not very fluent in being a vibe scribe, I cannot accurately relay how pure and hollistic the presentation is in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater the way Squigglydot can in her review that perfectly encapsulates how this game makes me feel.; I was there age 11-12 with a skateboard in hand because of this game, at the only skatepark I was aware of in a 50 mile radius, where some 20-something tried his damndest to teach me to ollie while never laughing at me, all because of this game. Maybe I'll pick up a board again and learn how these punks make slabs of wood orbit their body through telekinesis, but in the meantime I'll just have to settle for this.

Update: I hit 4.6m