FULL DISCLOSURE: I haven’t played this game since it came out.

“I landed on this emotional idea of, can we, over the course of the game, make you feel this intense hate that is universal in the same way that unconditional love is universal? [...] This hate that people feel has the same kind of universality. You hate someone so much that you want them to suffer in the way they’ve made someone you love suffer.”

Even setting aside Neil Druckmann’s politics, there’s something I find deeply ugly about this quote, about the notion that seething hatred is a universal human experience on the level of unconditional love. This misanthropic mindset really does explain a lot about the tone and direction of The Last of Us: Part II. There’s a lot you could say about this game, and even more that has been said, but I will add this: Part II is mad edgy.

It’s a masterwork of simulated violence that wants you to feel bad about playing it. The tight encounter design and the new movement options make every room a dynamic, deadly puzzle box that inevitably turns into an adrenaline-fueled killing spree. By design, these situations quickly spiral out of the player’s control, forcing them to resort to messy, cruel, costly means to save their own life. And yet, combat and cutscenes are peppered with transparent, heavy-handed attempts to make the player feel guilty for the violence unfolding in-game. Human enemies scream in agony and their friends call for them by name; at one point, Ellie is required to shoot a dog to progress and later Abby is shown playing with that same dog.

This is a cocktail that goes down much smoother when you reconceptualize it as a work of exploitation fiction rather than a “story-driven game” with “themes'' about the “human condition.” Its overwrought, contrived revenge plot would be a major flaw in a “story-driven game” but now it becomes merely an engine to pull the player from one messy, desperate firefight to another. The countless brutal murders Ellie and Abby commit, the gory excess, it becomes part of the fun. I don’t know, maybe I’m sick in the head. Maybe I missed the point of this game. Maybe there isn’t a point worth engaging with. Either way, I’m just here for the combat.

(I actually wanted to elaborate on my thoughts on Skyrim, but my brain wanted to do this instead. I’m sorry.)

The problem with the Rat Race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.

I remember reading this aphorism frequently growing up, most frequently on boomer chain-email threads, but it seems truer than ever today as corporate culture gets ever more toxic and exploitative. So an indie video game with an anti-corporate message (like this game, or the excellent Going Under) is something I can get behind. I can't deny that the premise of this game - an intern making a huge splash by shouting the previously-forgotten word 'no' at his superiors - is entertaining. The writing is generally sharp and witty, and (without getting into spoiler territory) the narrative is heartwarming and inspiring in moments, though it can also come across as shallow and overly-idealistic.

The game's main flaw is in how its simplistic mechanics stretch an already-streamlined experience very thin. You can switch stances to say 'no' in different tones of voice, charge up the volume and intensity of your 'no', and even do stuff like clap sarcastically to confuse people before saying 'no' to them... but barring one or two exceptions, almost none of those options make any difference to the outcomes of your interactions. All the different ways to say 'no' are entirely cosmetic, and it feels like the optimum way to play the game is to delay saying 'no' as long as possible, giving each character the chance to say all their lines and giving the good writing more of a spotlight.

However, going with this approach, it strikes me how much the entire game just comes across as one long interactive cutscene, in the vein of stuff like Plumbers Don't Wear Ties (brrrrr!) And while Say No! More is far better than that unholy abomination, and I daresay nearly as good as a game of its type can possibly get... the problem with comparing 'interactive cutscene' games is that even if you win, you're still an interactive cutscene.

Finally wrapped up the game after dropping it earlier this year. I managed to get through the whole thing only restarting once towards the beginning of the game, which made for an interesting experience where I spent its entire twenty-odd hours anticipating needing to do it all over again and ultimately being just fine. The other side effect of that though is that I never got the pay-off of restarting and having all of the skills and banked EXP giving me the power trip of blowing through the once difficult earlier game. In any case!
The game has so much personality. There are so many bizarre design decisions and weird quirks to the game that you need to slowly figure out yourself, and even now I couldn't tell you with certainty what you do and don't lose when you do the different kind of SOLs, but it's so strange and compelling.
The Regent fights at the end are impressively tough, and each time I was convinced that this would be the boss that sent me back to the beginning only to come out ahead. Absolute Defense is a crazy mechanic, but it really does a lot to crank up the tension in the end game.

Back when I was a kid my older brother got this game after seeing me struggle so much trying to play BoF IV. He didn't really like it that much, we were big JRPG heads and anything that didn't look or play like Final Fantasy was discarded as a waste of time. I thought it looked pretty cool tho so it always hovered somewhere in the back of my mind.

Over the years i've only heard this game mentioned as the "bad one", "the one that's plays badly", etc etc.

After my BoF IV replay I was willing to give it a shot cause I was always fascinated by the concept of "you're stuck underground and your journey is to make it to the outside world." Turns out I shouldn't ever trust other people's opinion on video games because it was one of the most enjoyable game I've played in the recent years. The combat system is phenomenal, and the constant anxiety of trying to outrun the constantly ticking time limit is something I've never seen in a game before, nor since.

I'm a big sucker for metanarratives, and I get what they were shooting for here. Stumbling through these longs dungeons that have no checkpoints, that constant doomsday clock ticking over your head, the lack of safe area where you can just relax and heal up. You get none of that, you have to spend every little ressources trying to move forward and get no chance to catch your breath. Why would you anyway? The air is disgustingly polluted so there is no reason to stop until the end of your journey.

But by far the best part about this game is those extremely hard and unfair boss fights at the end of each dungeons. I was annoyed at first, but then Bosch said "Protect your friends or save yourself, you can't do both !" and suddenly I understood. They are meant to be unfair because the game gives you a choice every single time: will you start over from a previous save so you can be stronger and more efficient (saving your friends by hurting yourself), or will your be selfish and summon the Dragon to make the boss easy? (Saving yourself by hurting Nina). After struggling for so long I decided Nina shouldn't be the one to suffer for my dumb mistakes, and I replayed the entire game without using the Dragon form until the very end, and I'm so glad I did.

I want to save Nina. TO THE SKY!

An exceedingly innovative RPG hampered by a poor engine and developer inexperience; as a first project, it doesn't get much more miraculous than Fear & Hunger. This is an incredibly difficult game to recommend off the cuff, but for people looking for an entirely unique experience, Fear & Hunger is the first 'RPG Maker Horror Game' to feel like a true horror game in the vein of Silent Hill and its ilk.

The atmosphere of the game is incredible, willingly sacrificing accessibility to create a game that immerses its player in a foreboding horror. The combat is an engaging puzzle system that works much better than the typical 'touch the enemy to game over' system, especially given that you often leave each battle worse for wear.

The game's occasional leaning on shock content and SA-content often reads as more jarring than horror, the movement controls feel clunky and uncomfortable, and numerous game-breaking bugs are littered throughout the game that drag down the experience significantly, but as an entry-level game it holds a unique tone and experience that few games have brushed against.

Bitches will tell you it's dogshit intentionally and not understand that a director can have creative ideas on how to mess with the player and also work with a studio that has no idea what video games even fucking are. Did Yoko Taro decide to lock the one ending that matters behind absurd completionist nonsense to punish completionists? Yeah, maybe. The soundtrack is definitely jarring and uncomfortable on purpose. Did Lord Emperor Taro-sama decide with his holy heart to have an unusable camera and to give the dragon a magic attack that blasts your speaker every single time and to make 50% of all fucking enemies completely immune to any kind of magic or any interaction with the core gimmick of the game? No, I think those decisions come from Cavia sucking at making games. A very interesting game held down by being borderline unplayable garbage.

Absolutely criminal what happened to the original creatives behind this game. I'm not sure I can recommend financially supporting the game given what happened with this game and the developer behind it but its also a must experience game for anyone interested in the ways a game can let you run wild and express yourself. One of the most fun experiences I've had in years with witty and creative writing that fundamentally influenced me and the way I think about both how I express myself in other RPGs and in reality.