The ideas here can make a good or even great game. Free-to-play survival zombie game where you can build and reinforce your base against increasingly difficult waves. You can recruit survivors which can expand your roster of playable characters. You can drive a truck around and explore the map. There's a bunch of different weapons that suit all kinds of offensive playstyles. It all sounds nice, but it's all executed very poorly. It's not even a survival zombie game, it's a dungeon game. You could to three incredibly easy dungeons, beat the boss, game over. There's no point to do anything that I just mentioned. What a waste of time, work and resources that were put into making this. The developers don't care because the game is glitchy and buggy to high hell. I'll give this a whole one star instead of half of one because of the potential this could have been a nice, fun, short, wholesome indie game.

The perfect videogame.

I can't think of a single flaw with this game, maybe just a nitpick regarding the lack of voice acting for optional dialogue, but I'm not illiterate and all of the main story is fully voice-acted. Also, before someone comes in here and says the dialogue is bad, pull your head out of your ass it's not that serious.

You're gonna tell me that a game with some of the hardest lines in fiction such as "You're the Sasuke to my Naruto" and take this seriously as straight dog-ass writing. You're really going to tell me straight to my face that this masterclass in (purposefully) cringe 2000's writing that makes Citizen Kane, the hack fraud, roll in his grave, BAD!? Listen up bucko, you clearly aren't as highbrow and intellectually adept as I am. I'm able to appreciate the subtlety and nuances of lines such as "...it's like how you can never be a true gamer if you only ever play on easy mode". Sit back down, so called "gamers".

Neon White is a videogame-ass videogame. I feel nothing but raw joy playing this game. It is so fun to blast through these levels and further refine your times. You don't even have to be good at games to feel like a total badass. Your lifeless corpse could be having death spasms on the keyboard and still pop off. That's not to say that the game is braindead and lacking depth, quite the contrary. You just don't need to be some sort of Gamer God Supreme to get something out of the gameplay on display. The skill floor is low enough that almost anyone can have a good time, and the skill ceiling is so high that it's a blast to keep running levels over and over again.

Back to the lifeless corpse, Neon White can cure death. If adrenaline made sound, it would be the soundtrack to Neon White. This shit slaps, FULL STOP. Start blasting this in the cemetery and see the dead rise and bust it down to the bops gracing their rotten ear holes. Just straight up one of the best soundtracks in a game, *mwah chef's kiss. And the vibes are impeccable, this game oozes in the sixth gen charm. As I said, videogame-ass videogame.

Just play this masterpiece, it is just so damn fun

Behold, the first open world Garten of Banban. That’s only half a joke. Every Banban after… I think 3 has placed everything around a central hub you continually return to, and this time said hub is like, this fuck-huge city with NPCs walking around, where the core areas you go to are landmarks within and such. Honestly when I entered it for the first time my immediate thoughts were ‘oh god they’re gonna make me search for a keycard in this haystack aren’t they?' but… by and large the game is rather benign about its padding. Not like it isn’t there, or anything — the game is evidently still on its quest to run out the steam refund timer by taking as long as possible to beat — but, as opposed to the endless hallways, forced backtracking and stupid platforming segments of previous Banban games, at least here things are stretched out in terms of things you can actually interact with. Minigames you have to do three times when just once could be enough. Points where you’re told to do something, you do it, and then the game moves the goalpost right when you think you’re allowed to progress. It’s still not great, mind you, but it's at least more interactive, and a bit less blatant about its intentions. If it continues down that road, then… look, it’s never going to be good, but at least an upward trajectory is… something?

And, admittedly, this is a step up. If not quite a return to... ‘form,’ it's at least trying to scurry back up to where it once was, like somebody rushing past all the enemies in a souls-like to get back to the boss as quickly as possible. There’s a genuine attempt at an atmosphere here — a focus on audiovisual elements, that… if still not making the game scary, are at least somewhat striking. There’s mood lighting. There are cockroaches scurrying across the floor. There’s background music. Creatures slamming against the walls as you’re exploring an area. There’s this one room with a wet floor where you see the corpses of these things hanging from the roof as you walk towards a silhouette in the distance and if they went with a higher saturation light it honestly would’ve worked. It’s not much, but it’s an improvement, and it gives some segments a bit more character than they’d have otherwise. Gameplay wise… it’s rather basic — and I wouldn’t say it’s like Garten of Banban 4 where it’s… honestly fun at points — but there’s some highlights. There’s a neat chase sequence where you not only have to parkour from building to building, but also figure out where exactly you need to actually go in the heat of the moment. There’s this section where you basically take an exam on how well you recognize some of the characters that was honestly a bit stressful? Maybe I'm easy to impress, or eager to be impressed, but while it’s not back on the upward curve — not yet — it's at least headed in the correct direction. Or something approximate to it. It's better than Garten of Banban 6, that's what I'm saying.

Unfortunately, there’s some new stuff here which… decisively does not make the game better for its inclusion. The drone, once again, is given an upgrade. And, once again, it’s horrible: now you can physically become the drone and fly it in first person and it controls exactly as well as you think it does. Hitting, or even just brushing a wall locks you in place for several seconds. The animation for this also forces the drone to recoil downwards, and if doing so should accidentally cause it to clip into something? Back to the start. Which is merciful, of course, but it makes even the simple act of going through a window a herculean task. Not even going into how the game will still have the drone in the last place you’d used it when you enter drone POV, forcing you to either back out and recover it or force the drone over vast swaths of map level just to get it where it needs to be. And also not even going into how one time I clipped into the wall and sequence broke the drone into another section entirely. And also there’s this one point of the game where it’s- where it’s literally just the baby chase from Resident Evil Village??? And yet they don’t understand what made the baby chase as standout as it was? The core of what makes that whole section work so well in RE8 is how simple it is: you see baby, you run back to where you came from, you pick one of the many hiding places the room provides you, and then you wait until the baby leaves. You’re not likely to die bar you actively attempting to throw yourself into the baby’s maw, which is then to its benefit: you don’t lose that initial impact of the baby just appearing through having to watch the cutscene again. Garten of Banban 7 fucks up in this regard: not only does the game telegraph hard that something’s about to barge into the room (where part of what makes RE8’s rendition work so well is how it happens out of nowhere) but there’s a full puzzle you have to do which involves summoning the drone and making it push buttons as you leap off of tables, all while you continually have to juke the baby around tables and rooms, all the while never quite telegraphing to the player what they’re actually meant to be doing. I didn’t even realize just what made the baby section work as well as it does until I saw this fuck it up, but I guess that’s one way of showing how imitation can be flattery. Sometimes you make it clear how the original is so much better.

Oh, yeah, sidenote, that rooftop chase I mentioned a couple paragraphs up? It literally begins with the threat right in front of you, and the area you need to initially get to… right behind it. I’m still waiting for that Euphoric Bros. masocore platformer, honestly. I still think that’s their true calling.

Aside from those notes… it’s a Garten of Banban game, I guess. A lot of the highs and lows are things I’ve already talked about previously covering the series. Its attempts at being scary, its attempts at delivering the Deep Lore are laughable at best, but in the midst of all this is this honest-to-god soap opera plotline which is honestly incredible to watch unfold, bolstered by a penchant for humour, of catching the player off guard, which… at least works more often than it doesn’t, even if here I noticed a couple jokes repeated from previous episodes. The voice acting remains as gloriously inconsistent as it's always been: pretty decent performances placed in conjunction with one of the developers speaking in monotone while constantly bumping the mike placed in conjunction with this... guy from Boston? guy with an Irish accent? desperately trying and failing to sound Australian. Gameplay wise, the modus operandi still seems to be padding, padding, padding: through making it take as long as possible to get from A to B, to having puzzles where the barrier to progress is “what am I even doing”, to hiding objectives where no player would assume they’d be. I’ve gotten the sense, perhaps, that this stretching out is on at least a little bit of a macro level as well, padding out this story as long as possible to make more games to get more $$$ from the kiddies who’re unironically eating this up, and Garten of Banban 7... does not beat those allegations — ending the plotline I thought the series was going down and cliffhanging on a completely new one. I know a non-zero amount of people here dropped after 6 for that reason, but if there’s actually an endgoal to all of this, if the games remain at least interesting in how they flounder then I’m still willing to keep going. I guess we’ll have to wait and see next time. 4/10.

Do relationships between people really matter? They'll all break in the end, sooner or later. Can't a person be himself and walk down a path he chose purely on his own, without anyone else's intervention? He may seem like a nobody, but he'll ultimately gain more.

I’m a firm believer in the power of language over one’s thoughts.

Not in the sociocultural or moral sense, but more of a structural sense. If you’ve ever been through cognitive behavioural therapy (we are not typing the acronym), you’ll probably understand what I mean: For the disordered, the process of getting better is often just the process of acquiring more words to describe and talk down our thoughts.
Indeed, many people I’ve met in my life have suffered because they lack the language to describe and address their own thoughts. It’s easy to say “I feel bad”, sure, but emotions and thoughts are rarely so binary and require a decent toolkit of words to properly address.

With this in mind, I believe there’s no arrangement of words more powerful than:

“It doesn’t have to be like this.”

What do you do, then, when everyone’s words have been taken away from them?

Simultaneously so bleak as to be genuinely haunting and so hopeful that it inspired a significant paradigm shift in my life, Library of Ruina consumed me ever since I started playing it, with its de facto claim over my every waking thought soon becoming de jure.

I was filtered by LoR’s predecessor, Lobotomy Corporation, perhaps my only genuine mark of shame in decades of playing games and indeed engaging with art as a whole. It was right up my alley and hit basically every note I love in games, but alas I hit the wall and turned around instead of climbing it.

Bizarrely, this might’ve given me the best possible experience in LoR - in turn, giving me the best game I’ve ever played.

LoR opens on an unremarkable note. Some twunk named Roland trips and falls into the titular Library where the Librarian of her role’s namesake Angela peels a few of his limbs off, interrogates him, and revives him later as her servant.

What is the Library?

It’s a fantasy dungeon where you’re the big bad and your goal is to slaughter the people who’re invited so you can assimilate them as powerups and catalogue their knowledge for Angela’s aims. Every reception starts off with a little vignette of their lives and personalities, hopes/dreams, and reasoning for entering the Library… and then you murder them.

Yeah, LoR and the overall franchise is fantastically bleak. The first few people you kill are desperate down-and-outs or bottom of the barrel Fixers (mercenaries) too unremarkable to have the luxury of passing on such a vague, suspicious contract.
Angela, a sheltered woman with the emotional maturity and life experience of a 12 year old, frequently comments on how miserable/horrifying the world is, only for the suspiciously world-weary Roland to assure her that this is just how things are.

Angela is a woman who, for the bulk of her overly long and painful existence, was trapped - literally, and by circumstance. In LoR, she attempts to assert her freedom by giving it to other people; one must sign the invitation to enter the Library, the warnings are written on it. The choice is there to simply not sign it.
Only… As Roland himself repeatedly points out, it’s not quite that simple. Indeed, none of the people you kill in the early stages of the game really had a choice. They were either too desperate or under the thumb of someone much stronger. With the passage of time and progression of the story, many of the Library’s guests are coerced, manipulated either by contract or by sweet little lies, or commanded to on pain of death. Some are compelled by forces beyond their ken, or the welling of pure emotion that so many City dwellers had shut out of their heart.

I think it’s fantastically easy to make the observation of “LoR tackles nihilism as a subject”, and it’s not exactly wrong, but I think it’s remiss not to mention the ways LoR ties contemporary nihilism with the omnipresence of capital and systemic oppression.

A gear with a purpose is content, for its rotation has meaning. Humans are cogs in the machination that is the City. Someone has to make those cogs turn. That way, the City can run correctly.

The City’s inhabitants are, as reiterated endlessly by both the pre-reception vignettes, Librarian chats and Roland’s various interjections, stuck underneath the bootheel of capital. A Corp or ‘The Head’ is a ruling force that, while it does not place the building blocks of oppression in the land, is nonetheless the solid ground they’re placed upon by others. All of the City’s structure is, down to the rebar used in the concrete, built to maintain a status quo that considers the deaths of hundreds of thousands to be an acceptable tradeoff, but treats tax fraud as deserving of a fate worse than death.
Because of this structure, and those that perpetuate it, everyone in the City - including many of the people who're forced to uphold the oppression against their will - has basically shut down. Feelings are a luxury nobody can afford, and the boot placed upon their neck has been there so long that they consider it a universal constant - much like gravity.
In lieu of any hope, even the nonreligious have come to view the City as a god. The actually-religious exist in a circle of copium, ‘worshipping’ doctrine which is about accepting the boot as part of your life rather than as your oppressor. Characters like Roland repeatedly say they don’t believe in anything, only to talk about the City as though it were a vast and unknowable god - at best witnessed, but never comprehended.

But it’s made equally clear that it doesn’t have to be like this, especially in chats with the Librarians - who often put forward viewpoints that Roland shuts down because his mind, so thoroughly warped by the foundational cruelty of the City, cannot comprehend them on a base level. From the top of the City to the bottom, an endless domino chain of “well, it is what it is” cascades into acceptance of horrors that have no real reason to exist.
These people are not nihilistic because that is their actual worldview, they’re nihilistic because they don’t have a choice.

Treat everything like a rolling ball! You cheer for it wherever the sphere decides to go! If you truly wish for the good of other people, why don’t you stop holding expectations… and just laugh with them at their side? Everyone who lives here is a clown! Clowns can’t survive without feeding on each other’s smiles, you see?

Rather surprisingly, though, LoR does not castigate anyone for their nihilism. Sure, they’re fictional characters, but despite being miserable-by-circumstance their stances are still treated as valid. It’s most obvious later on, where one character finds out the orders they’ve been given were forged and is not at all angry - why would they be? Lies and truth are purpose all the same, and purpose is a luxury unto itself. If anything, they’re at least happy that their exploitation benefited them and their oppressor rather than merely the oppressor.

It’s somewhat difficult to discuss this topic further without spoilers. I’d like to come back and write a longer review, but for now I’m trying to keep it clean.

Art narrows your vision, after all. You stop caring about the things around you. That’s how most artists seem to act, I think. And so, you indulge in the craft, not realizing that you’re throwing yourself and your surroundings into the fire you started. It’s like the human life when you think about it.

My praise of LoR’s handling of nihilism and everything around it also comes with the caveat that I, personally, got tired of overly bleak stories not too long ago. Even Disco Elysium veered too close to the fatal threshold a few times, and so does LoR, but neither game crosses it.

Really, Disco Elysium is an excellent comparison if we’re sticking to purely positive ones.

Everyone in this game is humanised as far as the narrative allows, even the ones that are barely human - in every sense of the word. They have aspirations, no matter how trivial and petty, and comrades, sharing bonds and jokes regardless of whether they’re more noble Fixers or nightmarish cannibalistic freaks.
It becomes apparent early on that, despite the Librarians’ claims that humanity was snuffed out of the City, it persists in the moment-to-moment of people’s lives despite the eternal presence of the boot.

I said up above that not finishing LC enhanced LoR, and it’s here that it really became apparent.

Roland was not present for the events of LC, while the Librarians were. By the time I’d quit LC, I had only met four Librarians: Malkuth, Hod, Yesod and Netzach. Sure enough, these are the most straightforward Librarian chats, though they still exposit LC in a way that blends well into the narrative without obviously being an excuse for people to skip LC.
But it’s the later floors - with Librarians both I and Roland were unfamiliar with - where things amp up, both in terms of how heavy the subject matter gets and how Roland’s facade slowly erodes around the middle and upper layers.
LC as an event in the setting’s history has been deeply mythologized, subject to rampant speculation from the unfamiliar and much rumination from the familiar. Getting walled by the game itself made this narrative almost… diegetic. Like those of the City, I had a vague idea of Lobotomy Corporation and could only speculate as to why it fell to ruin in the intervening moments between games, but like the Librarians I was familiar enough with the company, its purpose and its occupants to recognize things and keep them in mind. Remember, the shame of quitting LC hangs heavy for me.

I could go on at length about the story, but to do so would spoil most of it - and honestly, I’d rather praise the storytelling for now.

Our conductor will be the one to fix that! He’ll take me to a world where there are pure and clean ingredients aplenty! That day can’t come soon enough! I’ve been filling my stomach with trash for too long.

LoR’s format is very simple. Each reception consists of a window into the guests’ lives before they accept the invitation, a cut to Roland and Angela discussing what they just saw, a fight, and then a wrap up conversation afterwards. In between receptions, you suppress Abnormalities (puzzle boss fights that give you useful treats) and have chats with the Librarians.
It sounds straightforward, and it is, but there’s an elegance to LoR’s usage of the player’s time - the format is maintained right up to the credits, and while some conversations can initially feel like pointless filler it eventually becomes apparent that LoR wastes no time.
I don’t believe that foreshadowing inherently makes a good story (an opinion which makes George RR Martin fans fucking hate me) but in LoR’s case, it does. As early as the 4th line of dialogue spoken in the game’s entire 130 hour runtime, it references concepts, character and organizations that will appear later. Truthfully, I was initially a bit sour on how many Nouns the game threw at me early on but around Urban Plague I was seeing a lot of those Nouns actually manifest on screen, often to follow up on either a bit of exposition Roland/Angela delivered or thematically iterating on something that seemed inconsequential at first.

And man, what characters Roland/Angela are. LoR has no wasted characters, managing to make even the one-off filler guests you slaughter memorable, but Roland and Angela really stand out as both the best in the game and my favourite protagonists in uh… Fiction as a medium for human creativity.

This is just how the world is, and the ones best adapted to it come out on top, simple as that. Adapt or die. If you can't, you either become food or fall behind until you're wiped out.

Roland is a funny man, a very funny man. He has a quip for everything and deliberately plays his status as Angela’s whipped boyfriend a disgruntled servant up for laughs, but like many real people who use humor to cope, it is plainly obvious that he’s hiding a lot of deep-rooted bitterness towards his circumstances and the world he lives in. Even many of his jokes betray that life in the City has eroded him, and his catchphrase “That’s that and this is this” slowly goes from funny to haunting as the game progresses.
A good friend of mine described him as “An Isekai protagonist but played entirely straight” and I think it’s an apt comparison; he has many of the same building blocks (sardonic guy with some bitterness) but the concept is actually explored and treated with any gravity. He’s also a literal outsider to the world of Lobotomy Corp/the Library, so.
Every time I think about Roland I inevitably recall a story someone once told me where their restrained and seemingly conservative father got drunk at a wedding and started dancing shirtless with his best friend, and when [friend] said "that's a bit gay innit?" he retorted "I WISH I WAS, SWEETIE”.
There’s a really poignant moment on Hokma’s floor where, upon being asked if he’s religious, Roland denies it wholeheartedly. Except… This instinctual rejection is wrong. He certainly believes it, but through his chats with everyone and his endless exposition on the City’s evils to Angela, it is abundantly clear that Roland subconsciously views the City itself as a malicious God that has personally picked him out of a lineup and fucked him over specifically.
It’s these little contradictions, hypocrisies and idiosyncrasies that really bring this game’s cast to life, but none moreso than…

The thoughts and emotions I hold when I craft them... A resentment towards the City for driving me to this desperation, and a blind anger for the rich. Bitterness, and... a yearning for vengeance toward the man who rid me of that hope and pushed me to despair.

Angela. Fucking Angela. My little pookie bear who’s a bitch to everyone (for very good reasons) and is so deeply fucked up. The depths of her misery are vast, simultaneously impressive and horrifying in their seeming endlessness. She’s the kind of miserable that you often don’t see outside of Central/Eastern European literature.
Which is a good comparison, honestly, because PM really get what makes a good tragedy with Angela. She’s miserable, haunted by a past that’d crush lesser folk, and desperately chasing a purpose she’s not even entirely sure she wants. In pursuit of her murky, ill-defined goal, she baits countless people to their deaths - becoming not much better than the man in her past she claims to despise.

But she smiles sometimes, and that’s enough.

What really strikes me about Angela though is how fucking transgender her storyline is.
Early on there’s a flashback to the early days of Angela’s life as an AI in Lobotomy Corporation where she experiences both profound amounts of empathy and a desire to nurture strong, intimate relationships with her peers. She’s then subjected to what I can only (tragically) call Male Socialization: Her creator affirms that she’s not meant to do that sort of thing, “things like her” are meant to feel nothing. Any expression of ‘unfitting’ emotions is shut out and shouted down.
When she breaks free of her shackles, she radically alters her appearance, having only a passing resemblance to her initial form - which is decidedly less feminine. I joked on twitter that she looks both transfemme and transmasc at once.
But more tellingly, Angela is infinitely more neurotic in this game. She’s expressive, has a short fuse, swears a lot, smiles far more readily and seems to show fondness for the Sephirah in her own roundabout way. As her humanity draws closer, she begins to feel shame. Shame for what she used to be, and shame for what she is.
It is incredibly easy to relate this to the experience most trans women have once that second puberty kicks them in the taint. At least, the ones who have self-awareness and a sense of shame.

It’s even more pronounced in the receptions. Despite displaying every sign of humanity, whenever guests arrive and are met at the entrance, they clock her as a machine and constantly rib her for it. “That’s not a human lmao” is said every other reception and it bears a deeply uncomfortable (positive) resemblance to trans people being clocked and mocked for their appearance.

As I write this, I’ve been pondering the concept of scale. You, the reader, have probably played a sequel at some point in your life. It’s natural for them to scale up, and I myself have played far too many that scale up far too hard. Halo went from an existential war of survival to a cosmic clash with demigods, robots and shadowy factions.
Yakuza went from being about one small corner of Tokyo to being a country/globe-trotting clash against conspiracies. Devil May Cry was about one oedipal gay guy on an island and then became about generational trauma and saving the world. Fallout went from being good to being terrible. Final Fantasy went from stories of heroes to failed attempts at modern epics. The list goes on.

LoR is a massive scale-up. LC was a game about some deeply depressed people playing SCP in a single lab. Given the scale of this setting’s City and the fact that LoR’s cast covers someone from every corner of it, it’s no exaggeration to say that LoR went from a lab to the entire world.

And yet it sticks the landing. The vignette format for character introductions helps; the Library is the centre of the game’s world, never once left behind, and characters are shown through brief windows into their life. It’s particularly resonant in the world formed by the 2010s, where people are more plugged in than ever yet seemingly more distant too. The entire world, too, is at our fingertips; through the form of fleeting windows into bits of an existence far beyond ours.

But the social media comparison is a little cringe, don’t you think? I do too.

If they want to live their lives as they see fit, then they won’t stop me from doing the same. Think about it. We can’t roam the street in peace; we’re forced to live in the darkness. What sins have we committed to deserve this treatment? Why must we suffer to ensure that your kind lives a painless life? We’re humans just like you.

I have this scar on my right knee. It’s huge, with its width spanning my entire knee and thickness on par with my pinkie. Looks more like a pursed mouth than a scar sometimes.
I got it from a very mundane event; I had an obscene growth spurt early on. During a friendly soccer match in school, my oversized body failed a dexterity check and, upon kicking the ball, my body went up into the air too. I landed at a grisly angle, my descent causing my knee to get dragged along some chipstones. Embarrassing, yes, though it was still some of the worst pain I’ve ever been in and the bleeding was so intense that the only reason I was immediately taken to hospital was because the school nurse nearly vomited upon seeing my bone peek through the wound.
But most people don’t know that, they only see the scar and my occasional limping. They can see the present-day effects of that pain and that damage, but they can only speculate as to the cause. There’s only one domino on display, and they can’t see the ones that fell behind it.

LoR’s windows into the lives of its guests are much the same, and they help keep the story from outgrowing its confines. Almost every character with very few exceptions is depicted at the absolute nadir of their lives upon introduction with concepts like ‘backstory’ thrown in the trash in favour of letting you use context clues instead. Such is life in the City; only the ‘now’ matters anyway.

I only realized that day that I cannot blindly trust what my eyes show me. In that moment of the past, I was made a fool. The shallow promise that our safety would be secured… The thin piece of contract is what cost me everything. Had He not saved me, I might have drowned myself in resentment toward the whole world… and met my end.

Now, normally videogames are a balancing act, or a series of tradeoffs. Many of the most fun games I’ve played have mediocre stories at best and outright abominable stories at their worst. Likewise, gameplay is often the first concession made for narrative. Indeed, the common thread of my Top 25 is games that weave their gameplay into the narrative well OR have a healthy serving of both.

The #1 entry on that list is foreshadowing.

I’m very used to games, even more outsider games, tone down their gameplay for the sake of marketability. It wouldn’t be wrong for someone to assume LoR, which is far more conventionally palatable than LC, would do the same.

And for the first hour or so, it seems that way. You roll a dice to act, whoever rolls higher goes first, and you spend Light to use your cards. Easy!

Except…

Inhale.

Every character on the field rolls one - or more - speed dice to act. Whoever rolls higher goes first, with 1 being last on the action order and Infinity (yes, really) going first. Multiple speed dices means multiple actions and cards played per turn.
Each card has its own dice - offensive, defensive, and counter - with each dice having subtypes for damage/defense types.
When a card is played, the dice on the card roll - unless it’s a counter dice, which is stored in case you receive a one-sided attack.
When two opposing characters roll on the same speed dice value, this causes a “clash” where dice now have to outroll one another. The higher roll goes through. This can also be forced if someone with a higher speed dice attacks someone with a lower speed dice - this is a redirect.
…But there are also ranged attacks, which ignore the turn order - this seems overpowered, but if they clash against offensive dice and lose, that dice is recycled and can roll again.
…Unless the ranged user has a counter dice stored, at which point they can roll to defend. If counter dice outroll an incoming attack, they too are recycled.
But-

You get the point.

LoR is very uncompromising with its mechanics. There’s nothing here that can be ignored. I didn’t even get into abnormality pages, keypage passive ability sharing, E.G.O or any of the status effects.

There’s a common sentiment among Project Moon fans that LoR’s difficulty spike is vertical. I don’t necessarily agree, for my many years playing YGO competitively and engaging with deckbuilders gave me a huge advantage, but I can see why.
Many games with some degree of mechanical complexity or an unspoken set of rules will throw (what I call) an Exam Boss at you. Exam Bosses exist to make sure you’ve actually been using and engaging with the mechanics that were introduced via antepieces in the hours prior.
Well, LoR has a neverending chain of exam bosses in each stage. Impuritas Civitatis, the game’s final stage, opens with two relatively easy fights before throwing twelve Exam Bosses at you. At its core LoR is a card game and you WILL need to build robust and numerous decks to progress.

But I don’t think it’s as hard as people make it out to be.

LoR’s strength gameplay-wise is that all of your options are available to you at any given moment, and there isn’t much need to bash your head against the wall like in LC or pray for good banner luck in Limbus. It’s very simple to back out (sometimes taking a guest’s book with you, which is akin to getting a free cardpack from your opponent) and come back with a new strategy/build/Library floor.
Once you’re in Urban Legend, the game starts offering routes for progression rather than forcing you along a straight line. The solution to any wall is often on one of those other routes; every enemy has a weakness or a gimmick. Bleed as both a status effect and a deckbuilding component appears early, and it’s useful until the credits roll on most enemies. My Discard Hod build was still being used as late as the final boss.
I suppose you could say LoR is more of a puzzle game than anything.

What really enhances the gameplay is how well it’s leveraged for the sake of the narrative, and/or for giving fights weight.

Most boss fights come with a mechanic that’s unique to them specifically, or they introduce new twists on an existing mechanic that’s meant to upset some of the more comfortable strategies. Queen of Hatred gets a lot of hype as the game’s first major roadblock, but her purpose is to teach you to use Bleed and to convince you that maybe it’s okay to skip a turn or take damage on purpose.
There are numerous points in the story where the game outright lies to you about what’s coming up. More than a few times does LoR throw a surprise, unlisted second phase at you or some other curveball. Shoutout to that purple bitch.
A lot of the single-enemy boss fights come with mechanics that at first seem ‘’’bullshit’’’ (lol.) but in reality are just there to give it some impact. One character having 5 or more speed dice might seem ludicrous, but it helps to sell the world and the sheer power of the people within it.
The majority of people who play this game will scrape by many of the harder fights by the skin of their teeth, but in a game all about the eternal upward struggle to live, isn’t that sublime?

Of course, everything up above is aided by how this game sounds.

My only light was taken from me twice… For a brief moment… I felt all kinds of emotions before that piano. Despair, obsession, rage, sorrow… But, it took no time for those feelings to dissipate into nothing. Everything… yes. Everything seemed beautiful afterwards. Was it truly a tragedy that I lost her? Who defined it as tragedy? You may still be blinded by wrath, but I made the decision that I will care not about those feelings anymore.

On every front, LoR is an absolute masterwork as an auditory experience.

The soundtrack is borderline perfect, one of the rare games with 80-odd songs where every single one is standout and memorable. The Story themes are subdued but perfect for their respective atmospheres while the battle themes maintain a morose atmosphere that nonetheless manages to carry a sense of excitement when needed. You may be the villains, but there’s no reason it can’t get funky sometimes. There are only three songs in the game that sound anywhere near heroic.
Mercifully, important tracks don’t often get reused and the single song that gets taken from its original context is used masterfully anyway. To say nothing of the returning songs from LC.
That fight near the end of the game hits like a fucking truck if you’re familiar with the last game’s OST.

And the voice acting, good god the voice acting. After so many years of enduring games where a lot of the VAs are just repeating a role they did in the past or emulating a VA they look up to with all the tact of a fandub, it’s so nice to play a game where the characters are voiced straightforwardly, as though they were people.
Sometimes it’s Roland being a flirty little dipshit when Angela gives him an order, sometimes it’s Gebura audibly trying not to throw up when tasting some coffee, sometimes it’s Chesed’s tildes being obvious in his speech, and sometimes it’s Tiphereth suddenly turning into a Yakuza thug when Roland’s beef with her spills over.
And, sometimes, its characters delivering some of the most haunting soliloquies in the history of the medium. There’s a quiet rule running through LoR’s entire runtime wherein every sickass vocal track barring one is preceded by a character delivering a soliloquy to themselves before coming back for a fight, and all of them are deeply moving.
The one prior to Gone Angels might be a meme now, sure, but seeing it for the first time left my heart in my throat and my jaw hanging from my face like a useless slab of bone.
Whether LoR is being horrific, tragic, funny or tense, the voice acting never falters. I was frankly amazed to find out that a lot of the VAs are either amateurs, F-listers or total no-names because there is not a single weak performance among the cast - and it is a huge cast.

Even on a base level, the smaller sfx are so nice. Clicking through menus is auditory/autismal joy, the various sounds of combat are sharp, distinct and punchy. 5v5 fights are a beautiful chorus of crashing, slashing, shooting, stabbing, clinking and roaring.

O my sorrow, you are better than a well-beloved: because I know that on the day of my final agony, you will be there, lying in my sheets, O sorrow, so that you might once again attempt to enter my heart.

I don’t like hyperbole. I was given the autism strain that programmed me towards sincerity, and the culture I grew up venerated insincerity and humor-as-a-mask so much that I can’t even stand playful contrarianism.

So I mean it when I say Library of Ruina haunts my every waking moment, and that it’s by far the best game I’ve ever played in this long, long history I have with the medium. It's left a gaping hole in my chest, a kind of numb longing that only pops up after a truly once-in-a-lifetime experience. I finished it three days ago, and ever since it has been in my mind for every waking moment. You don't know how crushed I was when I realized "grief" is a word that the City's inhabitants don't have.

If you have any familiarity with me or my reviews, you’ll probably know that my critical brain is on 24/7. Not by choice, that’s just how I’m wired. Things like nostalgia and hype tend to not have much of an effect. I carry this into my reviews, even if it means dunking on things I have a lot of fondness for.

Yet I can’t really find any fault with LoR beyond some minor bugs/typos the fact that the anti-capitalist story was followed up by Limbus Company - a gacha game. But that’s that, and this is this.

“Flawless” isn’t a word I use lightly, and I’m not going to use it here. Not because I think it’s flawed, no, but because to defend that position would require both an actual thesis and also for me to spoil the entire game, start-finish. Maybe some other time.

I didn’t intend for this to get so long or so heartfelt, so I have no idea how to close it off.

Uh… How’s the weather where you live? That train was fucked up, right? Do you think the game would’ve been better if Binah didn’t wear shoes?

See you next time.

only so many times I can go thru the same floors with the same enemies and the same bosses and the same weapons and the same everythings. for something so lauded I expected some variety. I'm sure some bozo will tell me "umm actually curse, there's six billion lines of bespoke artisinal stone baked dialogue" but you can blow it out your ass if the whole thing's contingent on slaving away in the metalayer currency mines for hours on end

every room seems to go on forever man. imagine if in isaac or monolith you cleared a room and then it filled back up with the same shit five more times. what the fuck guys? you have like four enemies per zone, you don't need to rub it in. is the expectation that I'm basking and luxuriating in these encounters? I'm not. I'm bored before I hit the third floor

maybe it gets better once I suck up to every NPC and collect all the gizmos and upgrade the weapons and upgrade the dungeon and upgrade the shop and upgrade the trinkets and fill out my pokedex, but I'll never know. I fuck with greek mythology when it's about cronus eating his kids and perseus cutting heads and severed testicles goin in the sea, but I don't think I'm the target audience for this kinda snarky post-tumblr young adult stuff. I'm glad folks like jacking off to it, I guess?

probably beats playing it!

Let's talk about niche appeal.

In the heyday of Flash, during the reign of Kongregate and its ilk, there was a weird sub-hybrid of CRPGs that crawled out of the woodwork. Heavily influenced by classic dungeon crawlers and Diablo-style loot tables, these Flash CRPGs would boast tons of stats, substats galore, unrestricted builds, stock icons and crunchy turn-based gameplay. It's been so long I've forgotten the names of most of them, but the Monster's Den series can provide the curious a solid starting point.

Hellslave is a game cut from the same cloth. You pick a demon to worship - your class, effectively - and then you're off, following a breadcrumb story trail to each new dungeon. These are top-down, full of unique art and little bits of lore. The enemies within are lovingly rendered gothic horror that, thankfully, manages to escape Darkest Dungeon's tremendous influence. Combat itself is, as noted, crunchy, relying heavily on stringing together a series of quickly earned actives and passives to create the build you want. And create you can: you're free to cash out and reset any time, no charge. A delight when you find yourself feeling experimental after a dungeon run leaves you with a surplus of gear that gets the old build box in the brain ticking.

There's problems, though. The tone is mostly consistent, but this is a translated title, and there are times when it stumbles because of it. Or, in the case of one screen, where they forgot to translate it entirely. At least one key ability I had simply did not work as stated. It's difficult to tell if percents are additive, multiplicative or both. There's little use for the money you find provided you're thorough in your explorations. The story is nothing to care about. And so on.

So it's flawed, short. It wants multiple runs from you using the same character when a second or third of its Diablo-style loops would be more entertaining with a different - or second - demon in your pocket. It's fun, but not gripping.

But if you're part of that very specific niche it caters to? Welcome back. It's been a while.

“So, what we have here for you today is a 3D-enhanced remake of the classic arcade game, Mario Bros.,-”

“Oh, wow, that’s pretty neat!”

“-made to be released exclusively on the Virtual Boy-”

“AAAAAAAAND I’m out.”

Remake #11

Alright Crash fans, you've officially lost me again. I'm not seeing what others do in this one. I guess the devs really wanted to add more variety, but instead of expanding on Crash's gameplay and levels, we get a bunch of nonsense. Underwater Crash levels? Boring. Jet ski stages? Why. Motorcycle races? Kinda annoying. A bi-plane dogfight??? I can't fuckin' stand it anymore!

There is one big addition to Crash's gameplay. Actually, it's more like five additions. Every time you beat a boss, you get a new powerup. They're a little superfluous, but I did notice that the level design going forward accounted for whatever new powerup you just earned. It's minor things, like occasional chasms that require the super tornado spin to glide across, but they're there. The game also introduces time trial relics for every stage, and I will come clean right now, I couldn't give a shit about these if I tried. The level design in this game feels weaker in general, and I have to wonder if Naughty Dog designed the stages with the expectation that you'd come back for the relic races. For me personally, gaining access to a couple more levels by earning relics isn't nearly as fun as seeking out cryptic hidden exits like in Crash 2.

Presentation's about as good as the last game. Being taunted by your enemies before stages begin is a really nice touch. Cortex sounds so dejected for most of this game, it's genuinely kind of hilarious, and a bit sad. They take full advantage of the time warp theming with the enemy and area designs too. Shoutouts to the water during the jet ski stages. I honestly have no idea how the geniuses at Naughty Dog got the water looking that good. MARIO WiiU would be proud.

Yeah I got nothing else. Cortex and his gang can keep their gems. I've had enough, personally.

maybe the first instance where i've completed a game and still felt so utterly unfinished with it that i wasn't even sure i'd be fit to write a review

i think this might be one of the best games ever but hold on - give me a few weeks to parse everything that just happened and probably also replay the whole trilogy

in the meantime here's a 9 alright cool thanks

I was going to write a long review for this but honestly it just felt tiring to do and it felt like it was going nowhere. Shockman 3 will really only impress in the fact it has a translation of the game’s cutscenes as they were never translated just like the previous games. Sadly even for $6, it’s hard to really say it’s worth going through this one unless you were already a huge Shockman fan. While I do appreciate games on this system being more available, this game feels so unfinished that the game suffers a lot for it.

This is not only the easiest game in the series but it reeks of crunch time with a couple of bosses dying before their dialogue can even finish, to gimmicks that have zero substance to them. The level design is also thoughtless and feels mostly like straight lines. Even that plot that was exciting to see actually ended up being pretty run of the mill and also felt rushed. While it’s cool it’s dependent on who you play as, it doesn't make up for them being rather unimpressive. You can’t even fully enjoy them 24/7 as sometimes the cutscenes fail to load their audio. I’m not sure if that’s an issue with the OG release or just this new rerelease but it’s rather annoying to sometimes have to rewind to fix it.

This release does at least have some cheats though I doubt you’ll really be messing with any of them this time but I do appreciate them being there especially since one would be impossible to achieve due to the PCECD start screen being skipped in this release. This also has a gallery and scan of the manual and thankfully unlike the past two games rereleased, there are no crashes on the Switch version. You can also mess with video options like giving the color palette an awful look if you’re insane.

It’s hard to recommend this even for the small price. Like I said before, I appreciate when a group lets these forgotten games be seen in a new light but Shockman 3 just feels more like a what could have been entry in the series. It has some good ideas and at least there’s still co-op but I can’t see anyone really enjoying themselves with this game. The game is poorly balanced with your OP projectile and you’ll probably only die once or twice in your playthrough. Even on the hard difficulty you’ll barely struggle. While this probably could still be your favorite entry depending how you viewed the past two, this was a pretty depressing end for the series on PC Engine. I expect the publishers to eventually rerelease the final game that was on the Super Famicom so look out for that in the future.