Elise, my beautiful daughter
You are a woman now, you ought to choose a wife

Will you pick capable and gifted tradwife Freya
Or sharp and intelligent fun wife Lebkuchen
Or homeless hippie from the woods Rozenmarine

...

Ending №5 Star-Crossed

At the moment of writing there’s very little discourse about Laika online, mostly contained within Steam. And with Steam reviews being Steam reviews, people are defining this game through easily identifiable correlative qualifiers. It’s set in a motorized wasteland, kinda like Mad Max! You ride a bike, so it’s Trials with a gun! The combat involves air pirouettes, literally My Friend Pedro! It’s a cartoony castleroidvania, so basically Hollow Knight! It’s easy to dismiss Laika as a hodgepodge pastiche of all things indie, especially in the season motley of overmarketed 90 metacritic releases. The best thing the developers could do in this environment was to release the demo version. It takes 15 minutes hands-on to realize you’re dealing with something special here.

When broken down to bare essentials, the ingredients are pretty familiar. It’s a 2D-sidescroller and you’re on a bike. You balance the bike with the left stick and aim the gun with the right stick. Checkpoints are plentiful but it's always a one-hit kill for you or the enemies. Except, the bike is a large hitbox that shields you from bullets, and you have very little ammo in the clip before you have to reload the gun by doing an air backflip. These two are the brilliant integrals which allow Laika gain its own, completely unique moment-to-moment language. A bump on the road that sends you flying isn’t just an obstacle – it’s an opportunity: either a defensive one to shield yourself from fire or a chance to regain ammo with an iffy flip. It leads to encounters of positional enemy prioritization, risky acrobatics, resource management and split-second decisions. It allows for boss fights that serve as ultimate tests of these particular player skills in more patterned, elaborate bouts. It’s an unusual arrangement of mechanics you definitely need to try for yourself to see if it works for you. If it does though you’ll find such a sick, satisfying system that presses many familiar buttons but plays a totally different tune.

Another structural aspect that impressed me highly is the fundamental purity of Laika’s search action pace. I tend to go on the demo hunts every Steam Next Fest season, and it appears that the current trend in metroidvania design is maximalism – more skill trees, more abilities, more gameplay modifiers, more quote on quote things to mess with. There’s nothing wrong with this approach (in fact just recently I really enjoyed Astlibra, and I’m quite excited for Tevi too), but it makes me appreciate a game like Laika, where every upgrade feels like a radical option expanding power spike. In fact there are exactly two items that give you new traversal abilities – and they are such an exciting change of paradigm that make you rethink the way you approach every gameplay moment. It’s that game from the universe where System Shock 1 was the touchstone game design classic while more numbers driven System Shock 2 was relegated to a curious footnote in history.

The voice of Laika too is diametrically different from what you expect in the medium. Through the advent of prestige sad dad games we've been completely missing stories focused on motherhood and associated female growth – and Laika is that exact tale. The explosive growth of Soulslikes prescribed exposition, The Lore, as the main worldbuilding tool – Laika defines its world without a single written description of an event. The game goes against the established flow if it can benefit from it, but where it matters – Laika preaches to the choir. As in, the anti-imperialist narrative about war, the atrocities it brings and how it warps the combatants, is, to say the least, appreciated in our current world. So are the serene moments of tranquility in-between skirmishes, accentuated by a wonderful vocal soundtrack.

As you can see, I’m very passionately dazzled by Laika. It’s one of the best game I played and artistically it came at exactly the right time. Give it a chance, don’t let it slip through the constant whirlpool of game releases. It deserves to be recognized as a classic.

Tatsuya Ukyo: my blorbo my plinko my poor little meow meow meow and also my glup shitto. Having had been a distrusting 17yo shithead myself, I know full well how much of a mind poison the worldview of total unbelief is. Hence, watching an edgy teenager turning this mindset around is just soothingly comforting — which is a hysterical quality to assign to what's maybe the most brooding and morose RGG game out there. A real gem in the series, and a really easy recommendation if you seek the grungy vibe of PS2 Yakuzas

Chants of Sennaar got me on a little cosntructed language kick so I plowed through this one over night. The core idea to have a single character who relays the language to you and wishes you to help learn it is pretty incredible. The execution is... poor to say the least.

The language itself is, and I'm sorry to say this, lame as shit. I don't even mind that vocabulary (huge spoilers!) basically being encoded English, but there's just no consistent rules to grab on to, like the ways plurals are constructed, differences between verbs and nouns, tenses, word order, nothing! The grug speak comments are fully warranted here.

The other fault of the game is that it uses language as purely descriptive tool. You'd think that it'll utilize the strength of the medium and let you engage in conversations of some manner with your virtual friend. But no, your primary way of learning is to point at items in the house and make your oomfie espouse the descriptions. You can have the same experience in your own house with google lens set to Dutch, it's just so cursory and boring.

There are glints of cool environmental storytelling, and the "hidden twist" would be awesome in a game with actual structure, if there was an emphasis on emotional bond you create by overcoming linguistic hurdles. But as things stand, 7 Days is such a waste of a great concept.

Endless one-button manual and like 5 moves total makes for a pretty worthless combo trick game. The level design doesn't lend itself to interesting exploration when points of interest are sparsely dispersed over plain fields. The music feels lifted straight from beats to relax/study to radio, and even stylistically it's been one-upped this year by Hi-Fi Rush. I mean it's very much aight still, but is this really what JSR fans were craving? For every edge to get sanded off to frictionless, gentrified state?