Maybe, only maybe, after all said and done, I got rhythm after all...

I did feel a bit nervous going into Hi Fi Rush, because even tho I’m not hesitant to show my love and appreciation for the rhythm genre, that doesn’t change the reality that is the fact I’m complete ass at them, so when mixing that with a 3D beat ‘em up combat style which, wouldn’t you know, I usually suck balls at too, then I was scared I’d be facing a doom or gloom situation. Either it all clicked, or I failed to catch its drift and begin to even enjoy it, I only saw those two possibilities and was really scared of the latter. I really wanted to love it, I really wanted to enjoy what seemed like a game made from sheer love and passion for the craft, and the prospect of not ‘’getting it’’ felt like some sort of looming threat over my head... Only now after beating it I realize that, even if that were to be the case, it wouldn’t change my feelings about any other aspect.

There’s so much to enjoy in and about Hi Fi Rush that I don’t really know where to start with; perhaps I could (and will) begin by praising the outstanding visual style, a wonderful mixture of colors and design that made me reminisce of the kind of futuristic punk seen in games like Jet Set Radio or even deBlob, with the difference being that the Vandelay campus doesn't hold back when it comes to being stylish. The corporation may be rotten, but fuck man, whoever oversees decorations needs a raise! Everything pops up with the beautiful cel shading that made me feel like I was playing through a moving comic book at times; seeing cinematics flow together into and after gameplay was a mastery of transition I was not expecting to witness, and how in it to its entirely dances to the rhythm in such a satisfying way.

I could (and will) also gush about the characters; the crew of Chai, Peppermint, Macaron and the rest of the gang with is hunger inducing names is a set of characters I really, REALLY wasn’t expecting to be so fond of, and hey, it’s nice to see a main character I can relate to... a complete idiot! I say that, but Chai manages to walk in the fine line that its between being lovably cocky and completely insufferable and coming out positively from it, and for such a simple and free of conflict narrative, it still manages to give him and the rest some incredibly impactful moments. Hi Fi Rush strays away for what I thought would be predictable plot points and instead tales a relatively simple tale with the perfect cast of goofballs, to the point I found myself wishing to see a little bit more or Peppermint’s struggles, more of Macaron’s character wise in general or that CNMN had more stuff to do ‘cause holy hell I love that fact spitting metal head so much (tho he gets the single best most surprising moment in the game so hey, you lose some you win some!). The villains are also a home run, never mind this game’s whole plot is about defeating dastardly suits — I’ve always wanted to bash a cybernetic CEO’s hed with a guitar!— but they are all so into being the specific trope or character they are going for that it’s impossible to not love to hate them, and honestly the big bad ends up being a bit boring personality wise compared to the rest of them (tho now that I think about, that was the intent, in which case it’d be pretty fitting to be completely honest), because they really are a riot.

Tho the funny factor isn’t limited to the big bads. There are so many jokes and gags that and that I feel like I’m watching an airport; whether it’s just the energy that the characters interactions ooze or simply the way they act between each other, Chais’ stupidity at the beginning (seriously I was laughing my ass off during that dream sequence), the way not just the main villains but the damn normal enemies are introduced and how you can discover that NONE of them were originally designed for combat despite being literal killing machines, or just incredibly funny moments like finding a random log of a disgruntled employee that decided to mess the coffee machine firmware, and for that to be a recurring joke THROUGH THE ENTIRE ADVENTURE, that, that right there, and I don’t use this word lightly (or use it in general for that matter), is PEAK humor. And what’s this? Very spaced use and references to memes that actually work as jokes in the moment and aren’t recent??? Hi Fi Rush, if you wanted my heart, you just had to ask!

Even if you think you know what you are getting yourself into, Hi Fi Rush always finds ways to surprise you. When you think you got this game nailed and it’s just combat sections between platforming and exploration zones then BAM!, it hits you with a new idea, a new enemy that introduces a new design, a new boss fight that completely changes how you approach combat, a new partner, a new cool moment, spaced perfectly between each other so they don’t grow tiring while close enough to keep you engaged. It never presents you with never seen before ideas, but it always finds ways to create jaw-dropping situations and mix and match concepts to create something that feels new, a sort of ‘’yoink and twist’’, if you will. There’s a never-ending feeling of ‘’wholeness’’ in this game, where everything works incredibly well when looked independently, but also as whole; it’s hard to not notice how much the game’s systems and ideas sip into one another and some things wouldn’t hit as hard if there wasn’t te other, like the music! It sounds good, they are fantastic tunes, but something is missing from them in re-listens, even the licensed ones... it misses the ASS-WHOOPING!

Seeing so many accessibility options calmed me down quite a bit when I started, but after a while, after playing and beginning the fights and the dance of combat... I was getting it! Not because I was good, oh no, my tempo is still very much far from perfect, and yet, I was getting it. The music began to flow through the sounds of fight and diging, the enemies attacking with the music the same you do, hitting the right times as well as dancing, it was a slow dance at first, but by the half-way point, I wasn’t going along the music, it felt as if I was making it through fighting alone. The new moves you get, the special attacks and interactions of your partners (which also make for some extremely fun platforming challenges) and upgrades nudge little by little, they compel you to be more daring, to dance faster, to be more aggressive, to know where to defend, to dodge and parry through your riffs and hits. Failing is part of the process in a way, it’s still really hard to get a perfect or even high rhythm score at first, and yet it’s fun, it made me want to keep trying, to be a rockstar.

It’s like a story or battle you’d imagine while listening to an intense rock song, only made into a 10-hour game full dream-like joy, and even beyond that thanks to the meaty post-game and incredibly fun side modes. An adventure with so many things to love that I even at this point in the review I wonder if was truly able to express them fully, Hi Fi Rus is a simple game in theory, but in practice is a wonderful, beautiful and funny odyssey, always hopeful and excited to keep going even when facing the clear dangers of such a conglomerate, always finding ways to surprise, to be welcoming, to make you feel like you got rhythm indeed. I know that many couldn't get into it even with the extra help, and I totally get it, it’s still a game that might reject you simply because it’s combat system is not fun or doesn’t click, that makes sense and I’m happy you at least gave it a go, but if you still haven’t, I implore you to give it a try, and even if you don’t jam with its battle system, who knows, you might find something else to adore about it...

Moral of the story? Finances are cringe, lesbians always win, Deemon can’t parry and 808 is best cat, that adorable (goof)ball is so precious...

I didn’t even know it was even possible to get combo-ed in Russian Roulette, but the Dragon Ball FighterZ shit the Dealer pulled on me proved VERY wrong. Seeing him with his crooked grin using the magnifying glass into cutting the shotgun’s barrel for the first time felt like being shot in real life.

Buckshot Roulette’s main story is pretty simple; on the first round you learn the most basic rules, and it’ll be the part where luck will have the easiest time to fuck you up, on the second you are given the items and the lenience and strategize with what they provide , and the third one is the final dance, in all the ways. Claim victory, and the bounty is yours, you’ll be done and free… But why not stay for another round?

The introduction of this nasty-ass setting is priceless, I for one love the rusty warehouse this is probably taking place in and bathrooms with the same amount of hygiene that those of my university, all while hearing the music of an unseen party at the very bottom, so far away yet so easy for its sounds to reach your ears. Then you immediately decide to point the gun to yourself, immediately get fucked, and from that moment onwards you know which type of game you are dealing with.

You don’t have much time on your hands, Buckshot Roulette knows very well that this particular little game of theirs can’t really go on for more than its worth, and so it makes the most out of its time. It takes a lil’ bit to take off, as I said the first round consists mostly on you, your ability to count a bit, the Dealer and the gun, so even tho our friend sitting by the table hasn’t entered insane mode yet, luck can really mess with you for a while and not letting you get into the real ‘’good stuff’’.

Die & Learning can only get you so far on here, with the introduction of items, it may not hit as much at the start how useful they just really are. Apart from the phone, which I found to be too unreliable and more of a waste of item slot than anything, every single drug or tool you can get your hands on works fine on their own, but together the options are insane. I only realized this after the Dealer made me wish I had smoked that cigarette, and from there on out is a tense, cathartic mind game, your opponent is not holding back anymore, and neither should you.

Perhaps I’m putting my heart through too much stress, but it’s worth for the rush that you feel in the final round, where it’s all or nothing, either after pulling off some insane-ass trick that works or when backed against the wall and without tricks, going for the gamble of the fucking century and it actually working, those moments are both hysterical and fulfilling as hell… tho… don-don’t go testing your luck unless you need it, i-it can go REAL wrong.

Winning that final bet on the first time and coming out alive on the double or nothing mode (and promptly getting the fuck out), that’s what’s fun, that’s what makes it worth, that’s what will make you keep coming back… true fun for all ages!

The core in here is excellent, it can really grab you beyond the normal mode and I’m really glad ‘’Double or Nothing’’ exists, but it still isn’t more than it is, a rush of adrenaline that lasts as long as it needs you, and welcomes you with open arms if you do decide to come back or stay for a little longer, and some of the achievements are a riot, so it also has that going for it!

When multiplayer gets released it’s gonna the funniest thing ever oh my god, if I already lost my shit wheezing against an AI opponent, with friends this is just gonna be straight up fucked up…

Welcome Back

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH I FUCKING LOVE PIKMIN, I LOVE BEING EMOTIONALLY ATTACHED TO SILLY LIL’ GUYS JUST TO BE DEVASTATED WHEN I LOSE ONE TO A FUCKING FROG, I LOVE DESTROYING AN ENTRIE ECOSYSTEM AS A SILLY CAPTAIN AND MAKING MY ADORABLE ALIEN CHILDREN CARRY HIGHLY DANGEROUS EXPLOSIVES, LET’S FUCKING GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

It's been a long-ass time since a game has made me feel this irrationally happy, just a barrage of every positive emotion imaginable compressed into a collection of 3D models and funny sounds. There’s something about commanding and caring about an army of colored plant-aliens and exploring these forgotten forests and lakes that made me a happy motherfucker, it’s glee in its purest state.

It's a response I really can’t explain, ‘cause in reality, Pikmin is kinda the opposite of loud and bombastic; it’s a quiet, borderline meditative game, mixed with an overwhelming sense of stress and time constraint that present every single second that passes in PNF-404. 30 days to reclaim 30 spaceship parts, 25 if we ignore the extra ones, an objective which, on its own, rises stakes to the stars, and that thought will dictate every single action, and yet, it still finds room for joy.

Progression in Pikmin is entirely dictated by what you decided to do in those 30 days, which also means that it goes by pretty fast. Once you arrive at The Forest Navel, the second out of the three main areas (there’s also other 2, but one serves more as a tutorial and another as a final challenge after getting the 29 ship parts) you will have unlocked every single Pikmin type there is, and considering how you unlock that area pretty quickly and you need Blues to 100% percent The Forest of Hope, you’ll have them all basically throughout the entire game, and the purpose and use of each is clear: Reds are the strongest and can resist fire, Yellows can be thrown the highest and can carry Rock Bombs, and Blues are the only ones that can go through water without kicking the bucket. It’s with that knowledge and army of friends that you are left to your own devices, and it flows; the openness of these three main areas makes the daunting objective and the time limit feel much more manageable, especially when you get the radar, which can be pretty early on. You chose which parts to go to first, which routes to take, which roadblocks to take down and how to manage your squad and shortcuts.

You can go to get a propeller without a care and trying to ignore all hostile fauna and barricades, and you know what, that may work and you mar arrive at the part in one piece!... But things may not go as well when your Pikmin have to bring the stuff all the way back… I learned that the hard way…

Your messes and fuck ups feel humongous, and unless you decide to reset your current day, those mistakes are gonna be felt through the rest of the days… except, it’s actually pretty hard to mess things up beyond repair. Even if you feel as you could have done better or lost a ton of Pikmin to some random bird sprouting from the earth or a giant bouncy spider, you still probably got at least one part, opened up a pathway or two, made a source of bombs accessible, build a bridge that allows for non Blue Pikming to reach different items or that create faster routes; the little worlds of Pikmin may feel big, but they are still… well, small, even if you screw a day or two, you probably also made something that will help you greatly in the days that’ll follow. Pikmin is a game full of losing conditions: extinctions, giant enemies, blocked paths… and yet is also full of little victories, constant reminders that your strategizing, both fly and between days, pays off immensely.

Despair won’t do much here, and there are reasons to be hopeful, and Olimar himself does a pretty good job of reminding that.

The Captain is a damn good protagonist in a way I wasn’t expecting, yet in the way he needed to be. This isn’t a game about saving the planet or even he Pikmin, those are doing pretty good despite the post-apocalyptic, this is a game about saving Olimar. He got his ass stranded and now gotta fix the damn mess, and that in it on itself is a pretty compelling idea, but it’s made even better by how fleshed out he really is. I really expected him to be just som random silly guy, and instead what I got is a man with a life back home, and learning about his life, the gifts of his children, the advice of his wife that helps him when he first crash-landed, or just knowing his deeper thoughts at the end of the day, his findings about the wildlife and ship-par description (or just complaining about his boss and company and him talking about a massage machine which is funny as FUCK), it all amounts to a character which I really ended up caring about. I want Olimar to see his family again, and that makes me act faster and more carefully, it makes an already fun part collecting and time managing even more meaningful, another piece of the borader Pikmin puzzle that falls into place alongside everything else.

The Pikmin blindly following Olimar, reaching new horizons and discovering the secrets that this planet holds as well as how the Pikmin themselves work, or reading the night log after a whole day of hectic strategizing; Pikmin almost seems like a tale about the fun in adventuring in the direst of situations. The Captain names everything he encounter after things from back home or his own thoughts, the Pikmin just relax and lay down when left alone and celebrate after bringing a piece back to base, the fauna can be incredibly dangerous, but that only makes it even better when you swarm enemies properly. The only thing that matches beating a Cannon Beetle deathless or stopping a Fly Snatcher from stealing your little friends is getting multiple hard to get parts in a single day; there are so many different victories across a sea of hardships that is hard not to smile, 9is hard not to feel accomplished when managing Pikmin perfectly or successfully cleaning areas and encountering its wildlife, hell, the hardest, most deadly enemies in the game and completely optional, some not even awarding any parts, and it feels warranted! Not every single action is your final objective, but everything you do builds to it, and a game that should be riddled with stress and tension (and at times it still is) becomes kind of… zen, to put it bluntly.

Not everything is fine tuned as the world itself makes it out to be; some stuff like the flowers that change your Pikmin to other types or bugs that eat bridges thing feel vastly underused, with the former being only really useful in two puzzles for two parts and the latter barely plays a part into things since most bridges that are affected by that will probably be used only once. And that’s not even getting into probably the only thing that made me feel frustrated at the game, and something that isn’t even related to anything to the world or the way you control… and that is the brains of the Pikmin. Look, I love these fellas and I love how dumb they can be, but when I say the blindly follow Olimar, I MEAN IT. These guys will disregard any change on level or body of water and will just keep on going, and once that happens, good luck finding them again or getting them out before they die! Out of the 200 or so Pikmin that died in my run, I’d say about half of those did because of reasons that completely escaped my or my enemies’ control; things like tripping, getting distracted or one Pikmin hogging the nectar form themselves I can kinda get behind, because they give them much more personality and they are, to be honest, funny as all hell moments. But losing members my squad just because the game decided they are acting dumb or even to some random weird glitch, that not only feels horrible, is probably the only thing that feels out of place in this otherwise wonderful, rewarding experience.

I didn’t expect to get all 30 parts, let alone in less than 30 days, I didn’t expect to learn to manage my little soldiers so well and for it to be so fun, I could have never see coming in a million years feeling so attached to every single member of the cast of this game, even the enemies that made my life so difficult, I didn’t expect this to make me feel so… happy. Pikmin is a small game about some small guy in his small predicament, and the small aliens that helped him and the small victories they accomplished along the way. It’s a small game, and yet it feels grander than many world-saving adventures, everything about it does, even placing a pellet in the right place.

It’s a small game, and it makes me smile.

Basically, what I’m trying to say isWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO PIKMIN IS DA BEST BAYBEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE LET’S FUCKING GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO-

Also, take a shot for every time I wrote ‘’Pikmin’’ in this review… way actually don’t you may perish wait waitWAIT.

The history behind and outside of Journey it’s almost as enthralling at the game itself; Chris Bell, former producer and designer at ThatGameCompany, has told of the anecdote of the time he got lost in Japan during a trip to the country, and it was the kindness of a woman that, without ex-changing any words and by Bell only showing her a photo, grabbed him by the arm and lead him to its destination. Personal experiences giving new design ideas is nothing rare in the videogame medium or in any form of art as a whole, but it’s clear that this experience stuck with Chris Bell on deep level; he would go on to make Way cooperative online game where two players have to interact and help each other to reach the end without using any words. If this idea sounds oddly familiar… well… makes sense, as it was most likely developed either before or after a game he worked that would release just a year after Way, one that would through the company though a spiral of development hell and complications… and one that would change and inspire so many to go through their own journey.

But I’m getting ahead of myself with the melodramatics (yes, this is going to be one of those), ‘cause when I said the outside history of the game is really interesting, I meant it; Journey was the third game to be developed by ThatGameCompany under their contract with Sony Interactive Studios, it was going to have a 1 year development cycle with a team of merely 7 people and none never really managed to settle on an idea aside of Bell’s concept, Jenova Chen’s direction and that it was going to have some kind of online component, I would love to tell you that development went smooth as butter, but the paper that I got regarding that only said ‘’shit is fucked’’. The team increased from 7 participants to 18, and the expected 1 year development cycle turned into an almost 3 year race against the clock where that company almost had to face absolute financial loss. To say that everyone that had a hand in the game had to face hardship would be an understatement, and Journey had to go through many changes and cuts before it became the final product we know today… but one thing that really struck me as I read interviews and behind the scenes accounts is that, despite the absolute hell and pressure and pain, everyone involved loves Journey, not in a sense that they feel proud in making it after the fact, but rather that the team really wanted to make this game something really special, and it caused them as much pain to see some ideas not be realized (in fact extra hours were CUT both to avoid tensions and so that the money could go to the game itself) as it generated within them a profound happiness to play for themselves they very thing they all worked together to create; and all of this story and knowing all of this background makes it unbelievable to me that the game that we ended up getting is as majestic as it is… and makes it easier to drawn some strange yet beautiful parallelisms with the game itself. While you can throw out names like accomplishment like Chris Bell coming up with the original idea or Jenova Chen’s fantastic direction, I think no one single participant is solely responsible for the game we got, nor the story of Journey seems to be conceived as a parallelism of one person or the team’s feelings at the moment of making it; it’s the accomplishment of a team of a few passionate people that even with misunderstandings and difficulties along the way, worked together for what they thought it was worth making, and funnily enough, I believe it was that search of ideas until something clicked and the cuts so that that the game could release… what would end up making it so beautiful.

Journey is a short and simple voyage across an endless desert, and even if across all of the experience it feels profoundly quiet and humble, it could say to me at the start ‘’Hold on to your seat motherducker, you are about to get journeyed’’ and I wouldn’t complain a bit, like, hell yeah man this is amazing, you earned yourself some arrogance and showing off!... But no, it never does that, Journey, even at its most spectacular and bombastic, it always feels… nice, it feels self-contained and just… striking and pretty. It’s honestly really funny to go from the hopeless and dead wasteland of It Comes in Waves to the constantly changing and colorful dunes of Journey; melancholy is a sentiment present in each ‘’level’’, this constant reminder of something that was once grander than life and prospered now is abandoned and left in ruin, but this sensations meld with the wonder and mystery that each locations inspires; even when it gets scary, this sensation of hopeful adventure and that the end is at hand is ever-present, and it helps that you feel like you are a part of all of this despite you limited available actions. Moving and emitting sounds are your only tools that are always at your disposal, as jumping (or rather, flying) is only granted to you by the flying particles fabric and the strange creatures also seemingly made of the same fabric, and it’s that exact dependance of the environment and your interactions, that necessity of analyzing the ruins that surround you and guessing what to do next while never feeling unnatural or challenging, it what makes it so compelling to explore everything, and it’s what made me submerge in this world, in its sounds and music and in its wordless sad tragedy… well, that’s not entirely true. This is a mountain that can be climb alone, yes… but isn’t it nice to have someone by your side?

Co-op in Journey has little-to-none extrinsic value: at no point there is a puzzle or some kind of platforming challenge that requires two players to complete it, there may be the occasional section where two players might be able to accomplish a task faster than if it was only one, but Journey is so linear in most of its sections than it never really accomplishes anything in the grander scheme thing… and that’s precisely the point. Even going beyond and ignoring the fact that someday Journey will be impossible to play online (even if luckily that fate seems far off from today), at a purely the level, that it’s not the point of this co-op. Other players appear as you advance in your adventure, as if you were encountering other travelers in a long route, and… it feels almost like magic. No words are needed, the only for of communication are the sounds you can emit, and this strange language means nothing… and everything at the same time. The boops that respond to the tooms, the high sounds you can make by maintaining the button pressed that grant the other player energy to fly that almost feel like hugs, and sometimes the sounds aren’t even needed: the kindness of waiting for each other, other players showing you the location of secrets you couldn’t even imagine… You form a connection with people you don’t even know their Steam name until the game is over, let alone talk, and that’s something beyond my wildest imaginations of what a game could ever accomplish, and turns moments that on their own have a ton of impact and emotional charge, into some of the most memorable experiences I have seen in the entirety of the media, and it turns the hopeless into the hopeful.


Journey came out in a time where both players and game journalist seemingly threw their arms up and screamed desperate to prove that videogames were art, when many games had long released and proved it by that time, and while now we turn back upon how we looked at certain games in a different light, not only now I understand how and why Journey was held in such high regards, but also why it inspired an entire generation of games inspired by its ideals and how the game itself is so special. It isn’t the first contemplative game, it isn’t a game that shakes the videogame industry as we know it, it isn’t the definitive proof that games are art… but it a damn good example of it, it’s a fantastic example of how the conditions that both inspire a work and under the ones it’s made can make it so unique and fascinating. Journey is a treasure, one that understandably isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and people have smarter than me have already sing their praises and problems with it; in that sense, I’m a passerby, one that’s incredibly happy of walking this amazing road and sharing it with the strangers that put a huge smile on my face, and even with the adversities that came before, during and after it, is one I will walk again, I have no doubt about it in the slightest… and hey, I might not have cried, but that didn’t stop from knowing that yeah… that was lovely.

I don’t know what’s with Game Boy platformers having random shoot ‘em up sections but I’m all for it, nothing like seeing my favorite plumber commit aerial manslaughter against some octopuses and a literal cloud!

It’s pretty interesting how despite the Mario series being pretty off the wall setting wise when you really think about it, Super Mario Land sticks out by being even weirder somehow, and I mean that as the biggest compliment it can be. A result that could only come from the combination of the lack of the series prominent director and the Game Boy’s own particularities, this game kinda fascinates simply because of the fact it exists at it is, and that no game would really rival it in that regard ever since… maybe Mario Land 2 and Odyssey but I digress.

Sarasaland has the madness of the Mario world and mixes it with UFOs and aliens, the aforementioned shoot ‘em up sections in the sky and underwater, Koopas that explode and Zombies that cannot be killed, and worlds that, instead of being based around a theme like forest or ice, are just the Easter Island or Chinese bamboo forests. The insanity of the new concepts that it brings and the spin it puts into older ones and how fast the adventure goes by makes this what’s probably the most surreal game in the series; a game that makes of the incositencies its greatest strength, and makes for some memorable moments, and I’m pretty fond of it for that reason alone honestly…

…BUT aside from that, this isn’t that great, sadly…

It has some other amazing elements, like the music which is kinda fire, the Underground/Temple theme is probably one of my favorite songs in the series and the Overworld and Muda Kingdom ones aren’t that far behind, but aside from that and the whole creativeness of these four worlds… this is kind of whatever. It has some cool ideas like the upper final door in each level that leads to the bonus game and the fireball changing into the superball —which is a pretty funny name change in all seruiousness—, but both have things like that irk me, like how the former only plays into action on repeated playthrough and some can be a pain in the ass to reach, and the latter being a pretty obvious downgrade when you really consider it; I understand the change was probably made for performance reasons, but being able to shoot only one ball this imprecise in levels this maze-like… isn’t great or satisfying, to put it nicely.

And when it comes to the levels themselves…. They sure are levels! As I said, I like some moments and sections, but in general terms, this is pretty middling at best; some parts of levels repeat not in other levels of the same world, but within the same level, and while creating multiple possible paths to traverse is a great way to compensate to being unable to create genuinely interesting obstacles in paper, they never do anything cool with it aside of finding the fastest way to beat it.

The movement isn’t the best and can be frustrating at times, the bosses sure do exist… aside of the excellent ideas and originality at display, this isn’t anything more than a serviceable, kinda clunky portable Mario game… which hey, not bad for its first go!

It’s fine, it’s decent, I can see why some people love it, I can see why some others dislike it; it’s a pretty impressive feat and a showing of how different creative visions and hardware can loead to extremely interesting results, and has a ton of historic value, but aside from that, I had a decent time with it and that’s about it.

This being the first appearance of Daisy and Tatanga is pretty rad tho, sad that the little guy didn’t show up in more games than he did, he was pretty cool me thinks…

Allow me to present you with a question you might groan at the mere sight of witnessing it, fellow reader, that being: are videogames art?





To that I say a resound:... they are even better than that

I really don’t know where to even start with Katamari Damacy, much like with the weird kind-of-not-spherical bringers of chaos and destruction that give the game’s name, there isn’t really a beginning or end, it just keeps on rollin’...

I wouldn’t be the first to gush about its uniqueness, both in its completely bonkers yet adorably silly presentation and its rather peculiar control scheme, one that definitively takes some time to adjust to, but one you do it’s like riding on a bike. Managing both joysticks, knowing when to turn and when to stop, where to go and what to evade, it’s a waltz performed by a mystical otter that plays the accordion, and you may be thinking ‘’Deemon, that doesn’t make sense at all’’ and to that I say EXACTLY! It’s a hectic loop, there were times I was sweating wondering if I’d even come close to the required size to beat the game, only to steam roll while some of the most varied and oddly beautiful bangers play in the background, some even compliment you! And that’s when the stress starts to mix with an zen sensation, a melding process that culminates once you do it, you manage to reach the required size, and from your mind an profound and sound ‘’WOOOOOOOOO!’’ sensation appears as you begin to try to go even higher, reaching uncontemplated horizons by your small prince mind and achieve a perfect star shine... only for the King of the Universe to go ‘’You call this a star? Oh me oh my.’’ ...

It feels too chaotic, and yet, it’s perfectly calculated. There are so many maps that it feels like new surprises are neverending, yet there are so little that learning their routing becomes essential as well as pretty rewarding; there’s so much stuff that it may be hard to know where to start or on what you can even roll over, yet it’s placement is so finely tuned, so perfectly put together that it begins to be like a puzzle that gets easier as you go along, and even throws some extra challenges like finding the scattered gifts across the globe or trying out the constellation stages. Even when the King of the Universe throws you to repair his ‘’naughtiness’’ or time seems of the essence, there's always a moment of respite, a small victory whether it’s in pure calmness or pure ectasis, or something as simple as triying to find out a new crazy set up or what do they ask of you next. Going from having to just achieve 1 meter to the three-digit numbers was a feeling of progression that seems simple, but I wasn’t expecting to see so well-crafted in so little time, to make me keep coming back time and time again may to grab a scarf or shirt on the way, or get the biggest cow possible and make one hell of a Taurus.

The little intermissions, the songs, the movement... it’s such a silly experience, and I use that word with the best intent imaginable. Katamari Damacy is comfy and hilarious, stressful and maddening, a cocktail of emotions I don’t think a game has made me feel in such a way. There’s not a ton of games that say goodbye when closing them, and even among them, Katamari does it with an irreplicable sweetness, the same with which i does everything else.

You gotta defeat mouses if you want to go up against a Kraken, you need to see small worlds before going through the globe, and of course, if you want to make the sky shine, you gotta keep rollin’

And before I wrap this up, huge thanks to @Drax for recommending me this one, it was the reason I came back to it after giving it a go in 2022 and dropping it near the beggning and I’m so glad I returned, it was beyond worth it...

One of the rooms in this game has the shape of a heart and is full of capybaras, and if that doesn’t prove to you that this is the clear GOTY of the year of the decade of forever so far then I don’t know what will.

Despite being a highly anticipated game for me, probably one of this year’s releases that excited me the most this year… I had no fucking clue what Animal Well really was. By that I don’t mean that ‘’I didn’t know what to expect’’, there have been a ton of games I didn’t have expectations of what they would be prior to playing them, but at least I had a small idea what they were about, their mechanics, and overall ideas. But with Animal Well, I had no clue about how it could even play like.

It was supposed to be a Metroidvania? Is it Puzzle-Platformer? Or perhaps an immersive-atmospheric experience? Maybe a highly experimental take on open spaces and secret finding? I didn’t really know before I hit ‘’start game’’ to be honest, and yet, even before that point there was something that called me, that fascinated me. This world of blues and greens seen through the lenses of an old CRTV is an aesthetic I didn’t know I missed this much, or maybe is that it’s done so effectively here; the surround sound and flickering lights that accompany such abandoned yet beautiful looking structures and the nature that melds perfectly with it… I don’t know, it reminisces of feelings and memories I don’t think I can properly put into words, but still filled me with a desire to explore this rabbit hole.

Well, I finally played it, and I have finally found the answer to all of those questions that once plagued me:…

…Yes.

Animal Wells is an experience that feels like it takes inspiration from a million different places and ideas, and yet it molds them together to create something unlike any other game I can think of; is the idea that surrounds the ‘’Metroidvania’’ genre distilled in its purest form, yet it’s far from being simple.

The well is a place of few words; none of the areas have a proper name, there are no NPCs to chat with, and it’s not like the small slime-like creature we play as has a mouth to begin with. The only text present is one found in menus, small one-word prompts, and the name of the items, and that’s more than enough… because the rest speaks for itself. Each area and the animals that live in them chant a different song, each room a part of a puzzle of their own; I didn’t know for them to have a name for places to stand out vividly in my mind, like the Lake of the Cranes, or the Giant Bat’s Cave, or even smaller locations like the Peacock’s Palace or the Disc’s Shrine. The world of Animal Well may be quiet, but everything speaks volumes, like visting an abandoned virtual zoo: every encounter with a new-found critter, whether friendly or aggressive, every new interaction like distracting dogs using the disc, or every major tense moment like running away from the Ghost… Cat? Dog? I actually don’t know which of the two is supposed to be, nor do I need to know that the entire sequence and puzzle is an amazing highlight and super satisfying to overcome completely on your own… No wait, that’s also the rest of the game!

Managing to create a world that feels so well thought-out and designed so every puzzle feels intuitive, while at the same time offering such fun to use and multi-purpose items that can break open the game completely and taking ALL THAT into account is honestly worth getting up and applauding. The Bubble Wand is the clear star of the show for me; being able to create temporary platforms is already a game changer, especially when pairing it with fans and wind currents, but then you realize you can ‘bubble hop’, as I like to call it, by pressing the action and jump button both at the same time and completely bypassing many parts and sections that otherwise would have required other actions, and best thing is that even if it seems that it breaks the game at times, the dev clearly accounted for it since some rooms have passages too thin for you to maneuver or create bubbles or even animals like hummingbirds that immediately pop them once you make one. I normally wouldn’t like when a game makes a tool completely useless for the sake of a puzzle, but in here it makes total sense and balances out the moments were you make out your own path with pre-designed puzzles this amazing, and it’s not like that’s the only tool that lets you get creative anyway.

The moment you get any item, about two seconds is all you need to realize the possibilities it can offer, yet, as in the rest of the caverns, nothing is ever spelled out; you yourself and your own imagination and problem-solving are the ones that need to overcome the challenges this wildlife imposes; I’ve never felt so rewarded in such a long time than when using the Yo-Yo effectively, learning the code to fast travel to the main hub with the animal faces —which remind me of a certain game, I think it starter with ‘’Super’’ and ended with ‘’2’’… can’t put a finger on it tho—, or skipping completely the Ostrich escape sequence and its puzzles, near the bowels of the map, by using the Spring, Yo-Yo and myself. It honestly comes really close to feeling like the levels in Mosa Lina, now that I think about: you have incredibly useful tools that serve a clear purpose, but ones you can also use whichever way you like to, only with the difference that Animal Well is an already built, profoundly engaging and interesting world, and using all this arsenal while interacting with the animal and the curse that seems to affect the well is amazing, and little things like fall or water damage aren’t taken into account to incentivize and reward experimentation even more than it would have otherwise.

If I had to point out a flaw, and one that may honestly be a ‘’only me’’ thing, is the inconsistency with how it handles some switches and shortcuts. While I get and really enjoy some gauntlets of puzzles, he fact some of them reset, like the ‘’On and Off’’ switches, reset every time you teleport or get out of a room, just makes things a tad more annoying, in contrast to how the yellow door switches stay activated even if you don’t press them all or die, which makes other rooms kind of a joke and strips them from the tension found in the boss encounters, for example. I understand that this won’t be that big of a deal for many people, but when the rest of the game is so impeccably designed and each room amounts to so much, these little annoyances are noticeable.

A game that otherwise… I still don’t think I can say I've come close to experiencing all of it. In a way, it’s kinda interesting to have played this so close after beating Fez for the first time, because while both of those games have a similar sense of wonder and are brimming with secrets, that game created its mysteries through the tools you can find within a same room and code-finding through a fragmented world , while Animal Well is an ecosystem on its own, with the complete freedom that entails. Even after finding out what dwelled at the bottom of the well, it's insane how much there’s for me to find, not only the Eggs, but I’m convinced there are things that I haven’t even seen yet, and I know for sure that there are far more items than it seemed at first.

At this point, it shouldn’t be a secret that one of the things I love the most in games, or in any form of art for that matter, is when they give so much food for thought, letting the imagination run wild and feel so massive and grand even if their locations are small; Animal Well is only a 30 MB game, and it’s the perfect representation of all this, the wild desire to explore, to have fun, and to fear the unknown, even when it's scary as all hell.

I’m obsessed with Animal Well, and its ambience, roars, and silence speak to me in a way few games do, and I’m happy to see that’s a sentiment already being shared by so many people.

Why do we seek that place? That land of wonders, of promise, of dreams.

Hallownest

The wastes howl wild. Sand beats my shell, clouds my mind. The path is dark

But the wind I trust. The wind too seeks the kingdom. It shall carry me there.

Weird and Wonderful

A quick glance at my profile will reveal the obvious: I adore Hollow Knight. I will keep my outmost personal thoughts for last, but I can’t in any shape or form start this review off without stating how much of a personal impact this game left on me, in so many ways it defined my views not only in videogames, but in art as a whole, and I’m happy this game is recognized as such, as all games should be (except The Guy Game, that one… no, just no).

This is not the first time I’ve talked about this game; some months ago, before I started writing the longer ‘’analysis’’ I do now, I did a mini review in which I stated that ‘’Putting in words how I feel about this game it's borderline impossible for me…’’, and that might be true, I may not be able to write a review that will fully express the extend of what I feel or even just a good review…

I’ve got to at least try. Now it’s not time for elegies. But for odes.

Shining Orange
I believe that the highest achievement a creator of any form of art could ever accomplish is to make the world they create feel alive, something impossibly challenging, but even in hardship there’s gonna be some absolute mad lads that are going to try to go against the impossible and shoot for the stars. To excel at making incredible ambience, visual storytelling and interconnected level design is something that only a few games have managed to this day, and in the world of Metroidvanias, most will point out at the likes of Super Metroid or Castlevania: Symphony of the Night as the supreme leaders and the absolute winners in every regard mentioned, and while I’m not in any shape or form implying that exploring the conquered depths of Brinstar is nothing short of immersive, a work of art has still yet to evoke in my the same feeling of wander that the dying kingdom of Hallownest.

Traversing the King’s Path and arriving at Dirtmouth are incredible moments, accompanied by the quiet sounds of the small mindless critters walking over the rest of shells and dirt and the notes of a lonely piano, but it is at the precise moment that you descend down the well… that wind too arrives at the kingdom.

Arriving at the main kingdom lays down a ton of questions; the initial cinematic doesn’t really present us with any king of objective , nor does it after we take control of the strange little protagonist, but we advance across the tutorial and we are presented little by little the most basic mechanics of the game, and perhaps most importantly, how we may take advantage of them to their absolute limit, and once we arrived at the desolate town of Dirtmouth, only really populated by a nameless old bug and a bench, a quick conversation with said bug reveals us that we are far from the best to arrive at the remains of these lands, many adventures have arrived, going down the wretched well, only to never come out. ‘’Perhaps dreams aren't such great things after all...’’ says the bug. Even so, we do go down… This is how Hollow Knight will present its objectives going forward, and pardon me the vulgar expression, but it is absolutely fucking genius.

Once a game starts, we are immediately presented with a clear objective, this is true from the most basic of platformers to the most complex of Sandbox or RPG’S; even games that sell themselves as open-ended and with limitless possibilities start off with an objective with an objective that may or may not change as the adventure goes on, and it’s usually like that because… well, because that’s how stories function. Even in a game like Dark Souls, regarded as a work in which we ourselves need to look for the story, tells you about a prophecy and that you need to ring two bells. Yet Hollow Knight doesn’t really tell you anything… or at least that’s what it seems like; descending to the grounds bellow to a world full of areas left for us to explore, is immediately clear that these lands have a lot to tell without saying a word. There are still lots of dialogue and text with a lot of insight, coming from the picturesque and lovable weirdos (and Zote) you come across and old tablets of information, and all works together to form the purest feeling of progression: there are no wrong choices here, every path you take might the one you need. The sounds may guide you, as might do the lightning and small showings of nearby areas; you may notice the green bushes emerging across the blue crossroads, or the black fumes of the void sipping from the deepest part of the sewers of a ever-crying city. The hums of Cornifer mapping the area, the melody of a unknown bug, the incessant moans of pain of the hidden enemies crawling above you or just the wind, howling inside an cave inhabited by a lamp that calls a long forgotten carnival, all accompanied by the silence or the absolute beautiful pieces of music that just make add so much to each areas, as they do the many different variations in the different sections. It all results in producing this incessant feeling of wonder, and the fact hat a ‘’true’’ objective is not presented to us until almost half-way through the game just makes it perfect: there’s no true pressure, no feeling of you losing time, every step is a new challenge, a new sound, a new piece to which learn how this world was or used to work long ago. I understand well that this way of structure and incentivizing exploration will not be everyone’s cup of tea at first, but it only takes a while and giving it an opportunity for it just… clicking. It invites you to get lost, something that only a few videogames are brave enough to encourage.

But this invitation would be worth jackshit if the level design itself was… well, if it was jackshit. Luckily, that is far, FAR from the case. 2D games, especially platformers, are bound to feel artificial in places; this is far from being a bad thing, but when you want to be completely immersed in a world, seeing flying platforms floating around can be a bit weird. This same problem affects 2D Metroidvanias, and in a way, it too should affect Hollow Knight, and yet, despite having pieces of land levitating around in some places, it still feels natural, this still manages to give off the feeling of being a coherent ecosystem or places that bugs would inhabit at the same time it presents incredible fun and interesting challenges, and the way all of these places are connected just adds to the sheer sensation of magnitude and naturality. Entire populated areas could be hidden in the most remote of places, but it still makes sense; even in somewhere like Deepnest, where mazes are the norm, it still believable that such a harsh environment would be so incredibly challenging to navigate as it is menacing. Hallownest needed to be a believable place in its context if it wanted to hit as hard as it does, and the fact it manages to feel so logical while at the same time being well designed is something that I really believe can only be performed through some kind of soul magic.

The traditional Metroidvania structure is also present, with paths and areas locked until you get a new ability, but everything rolls extremely natural, there’s no door that requires a specific power up, and with the exceptions of gates that need certain keys, almost every time progress is cut comes off not through artificial methods, but because maybe there’s just a wall that’s too high or a pit too deep. Even those that you could consider as more ‘’fake’’, like the void walls, maintain cohesion with the overall picture of world, and is fascinating to obtain more and more new abilities as it goes on; progression is slow yet steady, and it makes each change all the more impactful, and you arrive to point that you began to interact to the environment in such ways that would feel impossible by the end of the adventure.

But not everything is about interacting with the would around you, ‘cause this place can be extremely harsh, and you sometimes you need to pick you nail up… and fight!

Stingy Foes

Is it fear, I wonder, or something else that holds me back?

I’ll admit that dividing this review into sections, while practical (and gives opportunities for wordplays, that’s always nice), is a but dumb considering how well every part of this game works with each other, and in many ways combat is in itself a bug part of exploration an platforming too.

Your Nail, the most basic of attacks, is both a tool to repel enemies as it is to assist in your platforming endeavors, like maybe helping you do a pogo-jump over spikes or help you reach and free the Grubs! Which is something that won’t end in a terrible demise at all!

On top of that, add he ability to heal, which is basically the entire backbone of the combat system: you only get soul when you hit enemies, and you can only heal yourself using souls, so managing it , especially once the souls spells are introduced, becomes key, and innavertedly encourages a more aggressive oriented play-style while also leaving room for defensive strategies, and the combination of the two makes the challenging encounters even more hectic.

Under all pretenses, this is a hard game, and this plus the lack of any accessibilities options will sadly turn off a chunk of players, and absolutely understandably so, but (Dark Souls fan moment incoming ) the challenge curve is not only perfectly defined, but also the challenge ramping up doesn’t hide the fact that as you go progress, you become more and more stronger, not only in terms of the many charms, new abilities and upgrades you get, but also from what you learn. Each enemy from each area from each zone feels like its unique puzzle for you to solve, both in terms of the story and how it connects to the world of course, but it also in how you overcome it; the game may throw you at incredibly menacing situations, but is the sensation that you conquered it, you finally learned something about that enemy or that boss, about their patterns, or even something about your move set and find your preferred play style, that is what makes each encounter the more rewarding (on top of the amazing visual, animation and OST… have I already mentioned that the soundtrack is ABSOLUTELY LEGENDARY??? )

The challenge has also another purpose tho, it also tells something along with the environments and enemies, it tells a story…

Of Bugs and Kings

Twice I’ve seen this world and though my service may have stripped the first from me, I’m thankful I could see witness it’s beauty again

Down from where these words are muttered, lies a forgotten city, once the capital of a proud kingdom, now a barren wasteland only inhabited by the husks taken by the plague and those brave enough to explore it and obtain its secrets and riches, all enveloped in a never-ending rain. A depressing sight, and yet, as if the beauty of what’s just right up above were seeping into it, a wonderful song is listened through all the streets and heights), and even with the dark truth that lies within the walls of the souls sanctum and the feeling of helplessness that the plague prophesies deplorable state… it’s beautiful.

Hollow Knight it’s the story about the hubris and sins of a king, about how his desire of creating an eternal promised land only brought suffering for everyone, especially in those that believed in him the most, and every single sacrifice and cost ended up in nothing, and how the once proud kingdom now lies in absolute ruin, the eyes of those that still limper on it colored in bright orange… but it’s also a story about bugs, a story about siblings, a story about a knight.

Hallownest is a profoundly sad sight to behold, especially when knowing all the context behind it’s decline, but it’s also this absolute beauty that I have yet to see replicated in another piece of art. The term ‘’quiet beauty’’ is thrown around these days and while it you could say that the kingdom has this kind of silent pettiness to it, I think an even better term to define it would be ‘’teary beauty’’. From Greenpath to the Resting Grounds and even the unfiltered gross of the sewers, there’s this sensation of that you are staring at something that even tho it does retain something of it, it’s true beauty is long gone, the aura of forever undone mistakes plaguing the air, but even tho is that is lost and now you can only witness the wild and epidemy… it’s still beautiful, and I think most of that beauty comes across not only in some outstanding and special moments, but also in the little times you share with the other characters. Hallownest is more fucked than it has even been but despite that, you encounter with some whacky and optimistic fellas, people that have come to this kingdom in search for answer only for the beasts and plague to spit in on their faces, and it’s still sad ‘cause most characters won’t get a happy ending at the end of this story, but they still go on, they still smile and search for a light, as small it could be, finding beauty in the impossible. Of course there’s still the ones full of ego and hubris, those maddened by the solitude and the decay, those one have lost everything and it’s sad to see that you are too late to even help them… but you still can help the others, and in those small victories alongside Cloth, making a blacksmith find a new purpose and love alongside a new nail master for both to pursue art, or even gifting a flower to a lonely old bug… there’s an indescribable beauty in that, and it makes you see this ant-sized world with a brand new perspective, a more hopeful look, even at the gates of the inevitable.

Hollow Knight is not just a game about persevering against hardship, it does tackle that but it’s far from being the only thing: it’s a game about the inevitability of defeat, of mistakes, of being left at the hands of the powerful without being able to stop it… and still finding hope in that. Is a game not only finding purpose, but someone to share it with, to learn that victories are never the end, that end is never really the end, that such small actions can result in other finding the peace they longed for so long, of going against Gods and Void, and still reaching that final goal, of smiling… even without a mask with a mouth.

...Incredible…
All of these to say that I really like the silly insect game… I should really limit myself in the narrative department.

Hollow Knight left an immeasurable impact in my I think I could never fully express, ‘cause yeah, believe it or not I could say even more stuff about this game, I’ve officially lost my marbles! It’s truly amazing how a title made by so few people could make me feel things that I didn’t think any book, movie or even videogame could make me feel, ‘cause I had played and experienced works that touched me to my very core and I still do to this day, but this one is on a whole other level, from its lands to its characters (yes, even Zote), to this day I still look at it in awe, and feel lucky to have had such a marvelous experience with it… and I know very well most won’t even come close to feeling what I felt, and… that’s more than fine, what do I say? That’s marvelous! Seeing so many opinions about it it’s one of the big reason I love the community so much, it’s always amazing to see others readings, and some will think that the game is not that good and I’m maybe too over melodramatic, but that’s what in a way sparks a lot of life into it. A work like this is going to have a lot of different points of view, and even if you don’t end up adoring it as much as I, I invite you to play with all good-will that my heart can give.
It’s an amazing work of art, a tale about sadness and hope that I really think everyone should give a chance, and one that in a way, as small as it could be, changed me, one that I hold extremely dearly to my heart, as I do the memories I gained while playing it… and the words of a friendly tall bug…

All tragedy erased. I see only wonders…

The cutscene that plays when using the dynamite on a battle is the single best thing ever implemented in any videogame in all of human history and I’m only mildly exaggerating.

A macabre festival where the dance never ends, a fever dream made out of bones and clay; Hylics manages to perfectly capture the feeling of a nightmare that seems to be completely absurd, yet it manages to craft meaning within the spiral of chaos. Places with random names located in islands that make no sense; mazes and entire worlds inside machines down ladders that somehow connect, and half of the odd weirdos you come across seem to speak in riddles and the other half take the insanity of this realm as another Tuesday, but all share the incredibly exaggerated animations, that range from the smoothest hand and clay movement you could think of in battles to just three frames for each walk cycle, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

If Hylics delivers something in spades, it’s definitively a sense of style, of harsh clay figurines and contrasting colors, of poems and jokes, with mountaintops populated by cone-shaped cultists and an afterlife full of fishes and a couch. I could list every single area and enemy in this game and say, ‘’WoAH! That was pretty weird and cool!’’, but I think the fact the game is just that, an avalanche of nonsense and weird shapes—and somehow finds a way to make an actually pretty simple tale and a world that has some sort of meaning and makes sense—is far more impressive than the weird moments themselves.

The harsh and quiet melodies, the special moves you get by watching the TVs, the pals you meet along the way; it’s really hard to talk about individual aspects of Hylics because everything seems intrinsically connected with each other and totally unique at the same time, which ironically makes it so some of the moments that stand out like a sore thumb are those in which it feels like the game doesn’t go nuts enough with its ideas.

The combat system, as crazy as some of the attacks get, is still pretty light; there are some cool things about it, like how it connects to the afterlife, some item interactions, and how the game’s own openness makes meeting allies and gaining abilities completely up to you. But I think that’s where the interest peaks, in how the combat is pretty determined by what you do outside of it, and when it comes to battles themselves, while there are some interesting bosses, it soon became pretty clear others are just damage sponges and that you can become pretty powerful very easily, and that plus how the areas are designed often makes combat seem more like a chore you sometimes do to get past a certain point or gain meat and money, and that otherwise evading conflict is often the faster, less annoying option.

And again, it’s in these battles where some of the more abstract and impressive animations can be found, and if anything, the final area and boss fight will ask of you to have gotten many special secret moves and quite the amount of bucks, so it isn’t completely valueless to engage in combat, but in a game with such a crazy atmosphere and universe, I was hoping for something far more engaging.

I was hoping to see more of the party members, who seem to lose their mouths the moment they join you. I was hoping for some of the puzzles to be more out there. I was hoping for more of its insane style to slip into other areas, like the menus or the secrets… Hylics presents an impossibly creative world, and even if it doesn’t last longer than it needs to and it's full of amazing stuff, it feels as if its full potential has yet to be achieved.

But what was accomplished is unforgettable; despite wishing I got to see more of their personalities, the yellow devil and his three friends singing and playing in a bar in the middle of nowhere and plowing through the forces of the moon before facing the final fiend are some amazing moments that made me laugh despite no words being said. Wade is a menace, but not one that has to be locked up; in fact, it should be let out even more wild. Godspeed, you crazy bastard…

Also, big fan of Somsnosa, it’s always nice to see another hat with horns appreciator…

I think that going completely nuts after spending 20 minutes in a virtual alien planet, losing my shit laughing after seeing my friends die because they stepped on a random mine and screaming at the top of my lungs when encountering the thorn man for the first time has taught me more about myself than any psychologist ever could.

I’ve played a ton of games that are fun with friends, games that were a good distraction for a couple of minutes and from which we had a good laugh or two; few of them I could call good and even fewer I could bother remembering. Of course I cherish and even still play the likes of Duck Game or Ultimate Chicken Horse, but most other multiplayer focused games that I played are, too put it light it, unremarkable; they know the fact they are 2 player or more only can carry them as an experience, so they entirely rely on that fact and forget to add something more potentially meaningful; they are fun for the duration of a discord-call, but not much else. The games manage to truly stick are something that truly commit, whether is by doing an extremely simple yet effective experience that takes advantage of its multiplayer status to make something REALLY fun and enjoyable, or by putting some meat on its bones and creating a more complex, deeper gameplay loop that manages to stand on its own two feet while working as a 2 or more player experience. Lethal Company is a bit of an oddity, because despite being an early access, and despite not fully fitting in neither of those two categories, it manages to be better than practically all the examples I could give.

It’s a fairly simple loop: start, choose a moon, descend, explore, get materials, try to not perish during the turmoil and fight against the horrors that your own company which you are working for is putting you through, get out (step that may or be not be accomplished), repeat; I would make joke about how this is basically the average real-life current work routine, but I’m afraid it writes itself.

This pattern plays out in every 3 day loop, but whatever will happen in each of the days never feels the same; maybe you’ll get lucky and encounter a ton of items just after entering the facility and get out before the night falls, maybe one of you will stay in the cameras guiding the rest and helping them stay out of danger, or maybe you’ll face moments that rival a fucking horror film, like descending to a lower level and seeing a nightmarish creature run across the hallways in front of you; maybe hearing a sound, being told by your friend it’s only your imagination, only to turn back once again and watching as a shadow monster runs towards you at full speed; or maybe watching your companions being followed by unspeakable creatures through the cameras as they shout through the walkie-talkies, moments that make you feel like you are facing cosmic horrors so far beyond your capabilities, but still tangible and real, and your options are either facing them, or to embrace the coldness of space at the hands of your corporate overlords just because you didn’t hit a number, it doesn’t matter the way you look, you’ll only see danger… but it’s also really funny to see your friends panic as you close the door on them and dancing after seeing them being mauled by a giant moth that only became violent because they hit it with a shovel.

Perhaps there’s a statement to be made about how we as humans treat unclenching horrors as all in a day’s work… I just think this is really funny. Lethal Company strikes that perfect balance of creating a perfect terrifying ambience and actual in-depth mechanics as much as it tickles the funny bone: it knows it’s a horror game, but it also knows it’s silly as hell. You COULD spend your hard-earned money on better equipment that will help you during extractions, but wouldn’t be real funny to buy a TV that only displays propaganda or a fish and call it ‘’Suppository’’? You heard of fight or flight? Well, here at Lethal Company we have a variation called ‘’fight or flight or laugh’’, and you’ll be doing the latter at lot even when you realistically shouldn’t, and the former stops being a feasible solution when you realize that your best possible weapon is a shovel.

I say that, but you will have to face things no sane person would want to, be it running as fast as your legs allow you or fighting it head on to save your life or a friend’s. Fun thing is, each and every single creature you come across will prompt a different response; some are slow but unkillable, others are actually peaceful when unprovoked but will steal everything you come across, others are stationary and won’t attack unless you go too close to them or are detected through other means, and others are just nightmare fuel. The ’’Thorn man’’ (I know he has a real official name, but I think it’s fun to give these little hell spawns your own names, me and my friends called the big moth Antonio) is easily one of the scariest thing I’ve come across in any game, easily my favorite creature in all the game and one you NEED to play around and KNOWS how to make you scared, and he’s only one out of the many that are in the roster, don’t get me even started on the one that crawls around that the speed of fucking sound, me and my friends decided to call that one ‘’AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-‘’, it comes right out the tongue when seeing it.

You always need to play around all these bastards, even when you don’t know which ones are inside with you. You have to know what items are a priority, when to get out and when to stay, that rooms are safer and easy to maneuver in, and when to get out before even more dangerous creatures start to roam the outside, or when the weather starts becoming a true danger. So far there’s not much variation in the installations themselves, but I don’t see it as a problem; not only it sells you better the idea of a monopolized, dire universe, it also makes traversing them get a bit comfortable each time, but they never stop feeling oppressive, since they are always rearranging every time you land, and pitch black rooms and steam leaks are never not horrifying. I’m sure that this as the time goes by, more variety will be added, so maybe this seems like an odd think to praise, since of course if there was more types of rooms and structures it wouldn’t be a problem, but it’s one of those things that, as it is right now, it doesn’t bother me at all.

In fact… there isn’t much that bothers me in general; the sheer amount of fun, of satisfaction after managing to survive together or meeting the quota by the skin of your teeth, and the sheer laugh at either the hilarity of this madness is soul-healing. It’s more than a fun time; it’s a true experience that feels complete, with a ton to offer and amazingly designed, both for shits and giggles and for shits and screams.

I just really wish I could have recorded some of those plays; I’m sure more will happen in future playthroughs, but there were so many damn good and unbelievable moments that feel straight out of a B horror movie or a fucking sitcom… luckily, one of my friends managed to have one of his buddies record a moment in another run; I wasn’t present for this one, but this is the type of moment that’s worth seeing and summarized the entire game in seconds, enjoy…

Some say that the best things are those that take its time in the oven before fully baking, and let me tell ya…

Tour de Pizza fucking COOKED.


It's almost heartwarming to see this realized: I still remember those first Pizza Tower demos on Twitter and Youtube and the Noise always being in the forefront, either as a boss of major part or them or an outright playable character. As we all know, in the final game he’s World 3’s final boss, not even the main antagonist of the game, tho that didn’t stop this psychotic gremlin from being charming as hell… but nah, I really wanted the fucker to be playable, and more than a year later, he’s here, to the dismay of all Italians.

I would have still felt satisfied if Noise felt less interesting or exciting to play as than Peppino, ‘cause I mean, it’s goddam Peppinno, but no, they just HAD to go all out and make a banger move set. I still don’t really know which of the two is my favorite, but that’s just a testIment of how fucking fun Noise is and how it accomplished what it’s going for: to make you feel that you aren’t playing as an overstressed cook, but as a goddam ANIMAL.

If Pepinno was the ‘’fight or flight’’ concept personified, then Noise is just the FIGHT, he cheats the game’s puzzles how many times necessary, he super jumps whenever he wants, he doesn’t need of Gustavo and Brick to save him, he’s got himself! Literally! Like there’s another one of him just becauseWHAT THE HELL IS THIS CHARACTER. And I mean, they gave him the sausage gatling, so at this point I’m pretty confident saying the game is finally whole, this is it chief, happiness has been found.

It taps once again into that sheer adrenaline burst that the first playthrough perfect, but in a completely unhinged way. Once you learn how everything about this mad lad works, everything clicks, the levels break open and the amount of tricks you’ll be performing are second nature: skate wall jumps, tornado spins into dives into jumps into more tornado spins, pizza crushers that demolish everything without much of a sweat and using it is super easy, and that’s not even mentioning how ALL extra mechanics, like the ghost transformation or the rocket, are completely changed to fit this rat brain’s way of acting, and it’s exciting to learn and glorious to master. They somehow found a way to make WAR harder yet more fun. HOW.

One would think that, since it isn’t a boss anymore, part of Noise’s completely unhinched persona would be lost in translation to playability, yet that couldn’t be further from the truth. Some levels even change lay-outs to fit him better and be more fun, but at this point I think it was the Noise himself that changed the before entering to make his life easier. His animations, how all title cards just have different drawings of his face on top of the characters, his ‘’no thoughts’’ face each time he fights a boss and how he can DEMOLISH them with the bombs (whoever thought of that should get a raise, they are so fun to use), some new songs that I'm 99% sure are just the sounds that play inside of Noise's head, it’s INSANE, as it should and then some.

It's Pizza Tower, it obviously was gonna be insane and good, but this is next level from what I was expecting, and I’m so happy it’s here. Noise Mouse is real bois, just that justifies completely another playthrough of this game, having bomb combos and level variations is the cherry on top…

Still, huge missed opportunity to not have Noisette or any other bosses playable in the Gustavo and Brick sections, like yeah, more Noise is fun, but I just think that- Oh dear, no I didn’t mean to- OH GOD THERE ARE 100 NOISES SURROUNDING MY HOME AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-

The true horror of this game is the cruel reality of the average underpaid employee in the fast-food chain industry. It's not Freddy who we must fear, the real monster here is the CEO of that cursed company.

It's REALLY hard to not see Five Nights at Freddy's as anything but the thing would end up inspiring such a massive cultural phenomenon and be the grand-father of the plague that it's the ''Mascot-Genre'', and right out of the gate many will despise it for that reason alone, and I mean, it's not like FNAF is the most quality franchise out there, but as someone that was there to witness the YouTube explosion when the original four games released and I still have a soft spot for these animal robotic weirdos, so it was only fair to face my past and beat the origin of the nightmare… and I’m left feeling so conflicted…

For the first two nights we have a game that manages to create an oppressive ambience, only make even more dreadful ad the prospect of not being able to move, be at the mercy of two metallic doors and a power system, and specially because of the looks and sounds of this crusty pizzeria and the lack of knowledge of the things that haunt you. It’s not a simple background for funny YouTube men to scream at in exaggerated ways, it truly manages to create a knot in your stomach, you are lost but always knowing what tools at your disposal, you are left in the dark and on your own, only accompanied by the calls of another night-guard that’s clearly trying to make this situation look like everything except what it really is. The jumpscare is only the release of all tension built during the night and the punishment for failing, and not what the fear of the experience fully revolves around. This blend of elements works wonderfully, and it made me realize that this game may be far than it could appear now-a-days… and then night 3 comes around and that just kinda stops.

Nothing in the game necessarily changes for the worst, but every horror elements goes away by that point and a deep feeling of routine sets in; you begin doing the same things over and over just faster and faster, and yes, it still is satisfying to overcome a night, but not because I feel like I defeated the mechanical forces that were going after me, it felt more like just getting over an incredibly boring shift… which it honestly may be even more suffering inducing. But even jokes aside, that’s just what it feels like, a samey experience that still retains some moments of terror with the introduction of Mr. Fredderick himself, but it also doesn’t last long once you realize what you need to stop him from even moving, and that the biggest problem the game could possibly have, because without those feelings it evokes at the beginning, you are left with a simplistic, not really visually pleasing nor interesting and tedious experience that only the only thing that it doesn’t even have a story yet, not that it matters ‘cause seeing how it convoluted it is a this point, it’s for the better to not really have it.

Five Nights at Freddy’s is not really horrible, and I don’t think I could bring myself to call it consistently bad. It works, it functions, it has an amazing start and really cool ideas, but it only strives to be an average arcade game instead of expanding on what it initially builds upon. Maybe more mechanics and animatronics would have helped, maybe they would have turned into less of a horror game, it’s really hard to tell with this one…

In the end, even if it’s not a great game by any stretch of the imagination, after playing all I can think of is not the problems , the night 5 tedium and the unspeakable horrors it would inspire, but the good memories of sharing theories and watching announcements about it with friends, the actually great stuff related to it, be it fan web series or fan-games. It has it’s own dumb beauty that a game so flawed could create so good moments for many… but I’m not dumb, I know very well of how its community and creators around can be and do some of the most horrible things imaginable, but I really want to leave this review in a good note so let me have this!

And hey, maybe the new upcoming Plus remake may solve many of the problems I have with it and turn it into a worthwhile horror game, but that may be me just being way too optimistic, only time will tell…

EDIT 08/14/2023: SO... THAT AGED QUITE POORLY QUITE FAST... I don't want to get into specifics since this not the time nor the place, but putting it short: following a controversy related to FNAF Plus's main developer, he resignated from the "Fanverse Initiative" and, considering how the game's page was pulled from Steam, it's fair to say that the game is not seing the light of day anytime soon... It's honestly embarassing to end the review in such a positive note only to be proven wrong mere days after the fact, even if there's a bit more of nuance in this case (I say this but the creator acted EXTREMELY bad and unproffesionally,I'm not condonning anything what-so-ever). Again if you want to get the full picture, you'll have to do it on your own, but now one thing is clear; this outcome is far more bleaker than I could have ever expected, and sometimes I should be more cautious with my optimism... Man, this sucks...

Oh and also, I played this with a buddy watching me and after dying a lot of times in the fifth night, the winning attempt was the one we talked about Ford v Ferrari and Christian Bale, so the fact that actor and this series of games will be forever intertwined in my brain for now on is not the outcome I expected, but it is very funny nonetheless.

Let’s see how well you can fly on borrowed wings


Call this game V.IV Rusty, ‘cause it never fucking misses

Armored Core VI has been one of the most positive surprises I’ve had when it comes to pieces of media, and I already went into it expecting to love it or at the very least like it, mind you, but it seems that my fate wasn’t to come out of this with my expectations set ablaze and built a new.

And thing is, not really knowing the extent of what I was getting into was completely my fault, Fires of Rubicon is the sixth numbered title in the AC series and the- HOW MANY NOW?!. It’s certainly not lacking the pedigree, and yet, probably because of the 10 years of radio salience the series has gone through, and 11 of a wide-world phenomenon that has changed the videogame industry forever that is the ‘’SoulsBorne Demon Ring I, II and III: Shadows Die Twice’’ saga, my understanding to Armored Core as series wasn’t as rich as I wanted it to be, and that kinda left my expectations for IV in a weird spot .

This not to say I expected Fires of Rubicon to be ‘’just like Dark Souls’’ or something like that, I knew this was going to be completely different; I knew a bunch of stuff and how the series worked, I knew how the series worked…

Except I didn’t.

I expected a fun mech game with deep customization options. I got that, yes…

But also so, so much more.

What’re ya buyin?

Welcome to your new living space: four cold and oppressive metal walls, a store that sells weaponry that I’m pretty sure breaks every Geneva convention both existing and yet to be written down, and like 5 different disembodied voices telling you in different ways that you gotta do some killing… joy!

You make home in different bases throughout the game, but you really wouldn’t know unless the game told you, they all serve the same purpose in the end: to make your mecha the ugliest piece of junk imaginable.

I’ve heard people say that you’ll spend the same amount time buying parts and building your mech as you do going ‘’pew-pew’’ in your comically big killing machine, but I don’t think that’s entirely true. The down time and management are the spine of ACVI; there’s a reason every time you die while in a mission the game gives you the option, to change your mech, you are gonna be taking a lot of work and not every question has the same answer… but you can make them be close enough! Even when the game poses some extremely daunting challenges, you can still say ‘’fuck capitalism’’ to the store and keep trying with your current build if you feel comfortable with it, I started using a Dual- wielding medium to light build pretty early on and even after all the upgrades and changes, that idea was kept intact even after the credits rolled.

Still, the game invites you to experiment and actively rewards you: the number of possible combinations is so humongous I don’t think it’s even possible to quantify from the essential legs which can define your entire giant robot to seemingly smaller things like add on and secondary weapons, but just as equally important, every single piece counts, and you are never punished for trying stuff out. Even if you create a mech that doesn’t even make sense of whose weapons don’t synergize with each other, doesn’t matter even if you spent all your money making it, ‘cause you can always sell those suckers for the same price you got them, ‘cause there are no obstacles to have fun in war!

But even with that freedom to try and fail, I imagine many players will center around one overall idea, and how not to when the game is equally as rewarding in that way? I feared that I’d treat my mech as a sort of ship of Theseus, making builds so specific that I’d have to constantly change it to the point it was unrecognizable from what it originally was, I waited for that moment to come sooner or later… but it never really did. Even against the end boss of the first chapter, an enemy that seems scientifically designed to make new players get into the idea they need to buy new shit, and probably the boss I struggled against the most… I ended up defeating them with the ol’ and reliable.

Building up a mech is important, but it’s equally as essential to knowing them. It doesn’t really mean much to understand some numbers if on ground you don’t know how anything works, and that’s what I found fascinating about the system; a system that rewards those who wish to experiment and those who wish to perfect themselves, plowing through enemies or figuring them out, sometimes both at the same time in both cases. Even if your robot starts as a Wall-E and ends up an Mazinger Z, your relationship with it feels the same, it feels as you made it grew and change, just as much as you did as pilot with it.

And that reminds me, speaking of the battlefield…

Got a job for you, 621

Oh boy!

You know what’s better than preparing to do cool stuff? Doing the cool stuff! If by cool stuff we mean committing acts that will forever hunt our darkest nightmare and make our consciousness eat us, of course.

Fires of Rubicon is not an action game, the game is the action. You know those dumb ‘’imagine showing this to a small Victorian child’’ memes? Well, Armored Core VI is that but like if instead of ‘’Victorian child’’ was ‘’any person during any age of history, even the current one’’, and I mean that the highest compliment I could thing of. There’s so much stuff happening at every single moment at every single second that the fact is all perfectly understandable must be some kind of deep dark magic shit. The freedom in this 3D movement goes beyond giving you space to shoot and gives you some damn crazy movement options, and you either have to use them or you better have good shields, because in this battlefield nonstop attacking and quick thinking are imperative.

Bullets flowing like traces of light or giant lasers impacting at full force, it’s a constant onslaught which you WON’T come out unscathed, but certainly victorious. This is the anthesis of ‘’You only do cool shit during the cutscenes’’, because you are the cool shit, and every time a character points out how fucking insane you are I don’t feel like the game is patting me in the back, I feel like… Yeah! I actually did that cool shit! Give me that trophy I deserve it!

The variation on missions and the places you visit feels so vast and natural I really couldn’t care if they get repeated, because even when they do, if feel warranted in the broader context and it’s always so fun to repel the forces of basic mechs, destroying or defending the objectives or facing off against enemies equal to you that I kind of secretly wish there was even more of it.

Battling against other ACs is such a pleasure, and whoever came up with the idea of the Arena deserves a goddam golden medal; not only it’s a perfect excuse to ‘’meet’’ other pilots and ACs you may or may not encounter in the game, but it’s also the perfect connector to make the OS system even more rewarding and to test your abilities as well as to learn from other builds. But it’s when you get to encounter real ACs in the wild that the true dopamine starts running wild; some of the hardest battles in the entire game are those against pilots that feel like other protagonist, with access to the same crazy weaponry and the ability to heal. It’s incredibly rewarding knowing that you defeated someone that was basically another you with different equipment, almost as much as when you defeat someone that’s straight up stronger than you.


The bosses are BY A LONG SHOT the moments where the spectacle is brought to a insane degree, but never to the detriment to the fight itself. It was during the fight against the ‘’gimmick’’ boss of the game and I realized how much fun I was having, and my jaw was dropping that I knew fully that this was a damn good game. Speaking of, I wish I was recording my face when fighting against one of them, it was a crazy-ass battle that feel even more of a bullet hell than any previous one , and I managed to defeat them with only one heal left and with my resources low… and then the fucker started rising again. I felt both so betrayed and happy that I could only nervously laugh, what an amazing bunch of bosses.

If I have to point out flaws, and I do ‘cause there are two things that irked me, would be the seemingly lack of any sort of real punishment and… the lock-on system. Previous AC game featured a debt system that could put you in the red and make you have literal zero money, and while that also seemed to have its surprising gameplay ‘’benefits’’, it was a system that I totally get why it didn’t return and money lost after every mission to pay off repairs is more than enough… but I still think there should have been something that punished you, if not for your using your resources, maybe because of reckless deaths or decisions. Because not every mission has provisions to pick up ammo at a certain point, I found myself letting me be killed or resetting back to the last checkpoint, knowing not much progress would be lost and the punishment wouldn’t be much higher. I only realized this four chapters into the game, but even before that I noticed that the game too lenient considering the setting and how the rest of the world operates, and even if it’s not necessarily a flaw, it felt off in some way… you know that it’s a flaw tho?

The lock-on… isn’t the worst, once you are locked in to an enemy you are set unless it pulls off some whacky stuff, and the red reticle tells you perfectly if you are hitting the enemy or not… but getting to that point is so confusing, so poorly shown, and it’s so hard and cumbersome to change between enemies in a game so fast paced, that I couldn’t help but groan at it every time a speedy bastard attacked me from behind and by the time I was finally locked I had to spend one heal, not even the manual aim upgrade helps much in that regard…

The lock on is probably the worst part about the whole experience, and its something that doesn’t even come close to make the battles less enjoyable, and hell, sometimes I even… like it? In boss fights specially, the little bit of confusion feels warranted and makes you rely more on your control over the camera, which ends up being the right call to evade many attacks. But even when it’s noticeably bad, it will take much more than that to ruin a combat so polished, so fun, so exhilarating and exciting as this. It’s in the middle of the action when I can only think of the battle, it’s in the store when I think of the planning, and everything flows perfectly…

But it’s in those moments in the middle of nowhere, or when seeing the briefing, that I remember.

There’s a greater horror beyond the scorched skies.

A winged mutt

The first mission of the game is to wipe out entire battalion of resistance members fighting for their land, just because they are a nuisance to a conglomerate.

The next mission is to destroy that company’s forces ‘cause another conglomerate told us to.

Welcome to Rubicon.

To be honest, this particular introduction is nothing new for this series, the very first game in fact has a really similar first mission tot that of VI, and this is where my lack of knowledge comes into play since I’m not really able to compare this game’s story to that of its previous iterations in any meaningful way… but I can look it as its own.

I can’t tell you how many times I was hearing the briefing of many missions and the only thing I could picture in my mind was the CEO of Arquebus saying something along the lines of ‘’Human rights? In this economy?!’’

There’s something so uncannily real about Fires of Rubicon horror, a silenced horror beyond the great threat that a possible return of the Fires of Ibis could entail, that threat feels cosmical, a cataclysm humanity has witnessed and its terrible result… but what’s more terrifying than that is seeing two corporations grander than entire system on a race to make that happen once again, a clash to the Armageddon only stopped by their own hubris and the efforts of the rubiconians.

Entire cities covered by snow and decay, their buildings now used as cover for weapons that should have never existed, companies and the PCA creating entire edifications in mere days, in the remnants of the institute of Rubicon, a memory of a series of mistakes that costed an entire solar system. The game tells a lot of this story through briefings and mid-level conversations (Kind of Kid Icarus Uprising, now that I think about it), and it even uses this information to surprise you with the complete opposite or something unexpected, but it’s in the levels themselves, with its amazing visuals and design, where the true tragedy of Rubicon is apparent.

Fires of Rubicon is a story that branches off even beyond the credits, but one that also feels perfectly told in its first run. What I thought would be a backdrop that gives context to why are you shooting ends up being everything, and the reason you yourself question why are you shooting.

It feels so violent, more so than the hectic combat, a story of broken pasts and promises, of lies on top of lies that end up in cataclysmic results, and of those that pursue the truth end up being the most vulnerable.

You arrive with a stolen name and as a dog of many owners, to a world where nobody has a face nor a real name, where they are but numbers from a series of gens of mechs and upgrades, where those who are on top of the world don’t trust those who are a little higher on the food chain, those who don’t even show themselves, as if terrible war they started is beneath them.

Nothing matters if credits are spent; even after you begin wars against them, you still buy parts of your mech from those same companies.

Little by little, I found those to call allies, like Carla or Rusty, and those to hate, like Snail, but even in their misfortune, they at least have a voice, unlike the thousands, maybe millions, of rubiconians, as muted as their cousins of the ever-expanding coral.

But even the end, is those voices that end up joining you against a force so massive it seems impossible to know where it begins or where it ends, so inhumane that knowing people are behind it all makes it even worse, and yet, you fight, you win your wings.

You are Raven.

I love this story, I love how open ended it ends, almost inviting you to explore more, but also being hopeful if you did the right thing, if you improved and knew who to trust and what you needed to do, a story that made each battle have the more meaning, and that made the final decision and the final fight some of the most bitter sweet moments I’ve experienced in a game.

Looking back, I almost feel ashamed, I expected so much less from what it ended up being, an inspiring trust in the player, an amazing combat and movement system, a story that is as grand, as tragic, and as terrifying as it needs to be. But also even more than that.

I arrived at Rubicon not even knowing what I was gonna fight for.

Turns out, I had to find the answer for myself.

Talking about what Destiny was meant to be back then seems mandatory when speaking of the game itself, and how couldn’t be? This was Bungie’s new baby, THE Bungie that created one of the most prolific shooters in all of videogame history, jumping onto not only a brand new IP, but what was meant to be the ambassador of the ‘’next-gen’’, a console exclusive (in the most literal sense of the word to this very day) that supposedly would redefine a new kin of MMO, a more welcoming, smaller scale one, but that also kept all the spectacle and fun of the sci-fi shooter genre. It didn’t matter what TV channel you were watching; you were bound to see AT LEAST one ad with Destiny as its main focus, the marketing bills must have been off the fucking charts for that one, it was insane. Talking about all this and what would happen after is, under any eyes, the only sensical approach, something so intrinsically related with the final product, whenever it wants it or not, that you can’t look the other way; the story practically writes itself.

Today I have a different story.

Back during the 2000’s and early 2010’s, my father liked videogames, and by that I mean he REALLY was into gaming. At first he never really had much of a interest for them aside from trying out some arcades back when they still were a thing in my hometown and playing on his friends’ personal computers and Ataris from time to time when he was a kid, at least from what he told me; by the time 90’s rolled around he believed that was a train he wasn’t meant to catch, a possible pastime too young for him, something that not worth getting into. Over a decade later, he would clearly change his mind, and tho that interest would be lost in 2016, during those years his appreciation for the medium wouldn’t be something that he’d speak of, but it was clearly visible to me. With what was back then the best gaming laptop you could get (back before the age of the LEDs) my father would discover his love for Shooters, both of the first and the third person variety, sandboxes, and even simulation and strategy like Age of Empires. He liked those types of games and every time a new big release would come around, he knew what he’d do when he had spare time and my mother had to go to work, and he gained even more interest in other aspects of the medium little by little; he even began to toy with emulators at some point! Me, on the other hand… I was what you would call, a Wii-lad.

By that I do not mean I was a Wii user only (tho for a long while I was), rather that I was rather closed to what some refer to as some ‘’hardcore’’ experiences, and tho I highly dislike that term along with ‘’casual’’, it is true that during the early 10’s I was anything but a shooter enjoyer. I was a fan of platformers and more simpler experiences, something that still holds up today, but that was especially true back then, to the point it was pretty much everything I played and enjoyed playing. There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with that, even if I prefer to be more open to every possible style of game as I am now far more, but the fact of the matter is, as you may have been able to point out, is that there wasn’t much overlap between my father’s tastes and mine. We both enjoyed the medium, but struggled to actually connect through it; that isn’t to say we didn’t try and that we didn’t had wonderful experiences, the memories of he playing Super Smash Bros Brawl with me and me watching him play Far Cry 3 and even sometimes helping him beat parts he just couldn’t are one I cherish to this day, and while those moments were cool as hell and wonderful, they were clearly moments in which neither of the two were fully comfortable with adventuring outside our own gaming comfort zone; there was still that clear lack of a middle ground, something that caught both our interests, something that we both could truly enjoy and talk about, something that really didn’t seem to be happening any time soon.

…and then Destiny was announced.

To my father, it looked simply astonishing, a visual sci-fi spectacle that seemed tailor-made for him; his favorite genre in all mediums brought to life in a way that was a sight to behold, a cosmos worth traversing and shooting through. To me, it looked like the coolest fucking thing I had ever seen, a space odyssey made videogame that promised adventures galore; I myself was also very much into sci-fi, and maybe that was what made Destiny tickle my ‘’only platformer guy’’ bone and made it crumble, this was not the first time a game presented me with worlds I desired to explore, but it was the first time I saw it to this scale and promise. This became the thing we would talk about every time videogames would become the main topic, we jumped onto that hype train and didn’t let it go for dear life; we knew everything that was coming out about and all news, but not much beyond that, we didn’t really knew who Bungie was, or what some of its promises and buzzwords like ‘’MMO’’ could really entail or not be, but it didn’t matter. Every image, every trailer, we were there watching it and talking about it, it became less of a game and it turned into something more, an experience to share even before it was for us to play. And then, during that year’s Christmas season, tho I cannot recall the exactly, my father came back home with a copy of the game; a present for me as much as it was for him. I still remember waiting together for everything to install, a process that took like half a day thanks to Destiny’s sheer size for the console and the shitty wi-fi we had back then, and it almost completely killed the mood of child-like excitement we both had… almost.

The moment that bar filled completely, we sat down, I took the controller, and what followed was… the cutscene that made everything kickstart, the character creator through which we made a space wizard alien destined to safe the entire solar system, those quite jingles that lead to that angelical soundly chorus that rose as the menu showed that mysterious whiter orb at the center of all, even higher than earth, and as we begun our adventure through the desolate wasteland of what once was Earth, being alive when we really shouldn’t have and fought against dangers that should have beaten us into a pulp, is nothing short of… magical, something that no game had made me felt ever, something that I couldn’t find the words to even begin describing, something neither of us could stop looking at in sheer awe. For but a moment, Destiny transcended even further, became something I could have never anticipated, something that back then I could only call… perfect…

What follows is a collection of thoughts of everything I dislike about Destiny:

The faults of Destiny, are so apparent that I’m surprised the disc didn’t crumble as soon as I touched it, some things now so utterly obvious it’s kind of adorable. Destiny is eternally confused, something that by definition works, but tries to bite so much it’s not that it can’t chew it, it’s that it can’t even bring itself to close its mouth. Its promises of a ‘’Small-scale MMO’’ don’t go much further than the main hub and the one or two other folks you can come across during the missions: if you aren’t planning on playing it alongside one or two friends directly, then what you’ll get is an experience that encourages meaningful player interaction so little that most won’t even bother making the slightest interaction during the levels themselves; most didn’t even bother engaging with PvP ‘cause… why bother? Not much is truly gained through direct conflict, and even tho random jolly co-operation can happen and it can be pretty fun, even at release most of the time what would you encounter would be players much stronger than you repeating past missions to farm exp and loot, and by proxy rendering the mission you were about to play pretty much to a cinematic with a bit more interaction. There are clears attempts at creating a more in-depth space for interaction for a console only environment, but it doesn’t stick the landing at all; the main central area is nothing more than a very empty street market 90% of the time, and again, this is an environment in which the bulk of players won’t bother to connect a mic, something that in an online matchmaking mode can completely fly and doesn’t even affect the experience, but for a supposedly far more open and interaction dependent shooter like this, it makes night and day. It all feels half-cooked, and the reason is obvious; Destiny also needs to work as a single player experience, something just one random fella on its own can fully beat, and the results of mixing both design philosophies are less than desirable.

Bungie was clearly aiming for the stars, to accomplish something different from what they did the last 5 times, yet they seemed too scared of getting inside the rocket; Destiny’s own foundations is highly inspired by Halo, which is a prospect that in paper sounds great until you realize this isn’t the basis of that series expanded to completely new horizons, but rather it directly clashing with the new elements and promises, resulting in this weird amalgam that compromises both visions. There are no grand encounters or missions; with the exception of the first and final one for each of the levels, all tasks can be summarized by ‘’go to x place and kill this thing/scan this this thing, repeat x number of times’’ with no great surprises in between; the down-time is always the same, the enemies you can face are always designated by the planet you are on, and every single encounter with enemies is an arena style fight divided into ordes each and every time, which it’s definitely the easiest way to design levels in which three players have something to shoot, but not the best way to design actual interesting challenges for neither of them, much less for only one. The game cannot even create challenges that interesting despite having an admittedly non-stop-moving basis to work from; the act of shooting and using abilities IS fun, not gratifiying once you realize you have to do it again and again, and so, because the arenas where the fight happens are never really that varied, the only way the game can generate difficulty is by throwing bullet-spongy bosses and high level enemies… notice how I didn’t use the word ‘’engaging’’ there. It’s just more mindless blasting, and again, there’s room for coordinated strategies if you have a buddy or two to play with, but that simply is not a real possibility when you are alone or random strangers, and so, it'll come a point when you’ll get stuck at a certain mission, and inadvertently, the game encourages you to repeat past missions to slowly level up, which encourages farming, which then encourages looting, which then encourages selling, which then encourages buying, and that encourages the entire process to play out once again with some pointless visits to the Cryptarch thrown in there from time to time (seriously, why would you be able to buy him encrypted weapons for only to decrypt them right after? That’s just gambling with extra steps). I’ll give the game this: it’s not a fun process, like, at all, but it is a marginally engaging one.

Bungie’s reluctance to abandon the old ways are also present in the way the wastelands where the missions take place and everything in them are designed; the four main areas are essentially mini-sandboxes, small open levels with certain parts restricted to certain missions, but that are completely free to explore otherwise, and hold some random encounters and fights across the map. I… like them, these zone really feel like desolate places, divided in cut and clear zones taken by different factions and commanders, areas that hold quite the amount of secrets and are super fun to go through with the speeder. Sometimes the optional combats in the open areas are even more fun than the ones found in main missions simply because they feel like they take place in an actual location and not just in an abandoned warehouse or ancient ruin, I genuinely don’t have much complains with how these are designed. My problem, instead, comes in how… static they all feel. Everything I mentioned is forever the same; batallions of enemy will be right there were they once stood after returning to the planet, the Vex and Cabal will be fighting in the exact same places locked in that neverending shoot-out, nothing will change with new descents or missions, it’s as if time loops every time you come back to the main-land. This wouldn’t be a problem if you visited these places once, but you don’t, you traverse them MANY times, and I’m convinced that they would have implemented changes here and there after certain missions… if it weren’t because, once again, this is a mini-MMO, and the one of the three players could have been on Mars a thousand times while other could be arriving on the first time; the game simply cannot craft variation in a way it doesn’t fuck up with the experience, but by also doing nothing, it can’t avoid shooting itself on the foot.

Not even the narrative is safe from Destiny’s eternal confusion; I’m not gonna act like I’m a seasoned MMO player because I’m simply not, but even as mostly a bystander, I can understand why many of those games stories revolve around the world itself or some major characters. You simply cannot make each and every player the main character, and so, you make them a part of the world, be it dividing it by factions or anything else, all of your player base is the protagonist, and even if they are not the real major players of the story, they serve a humongous part on it, they feel seen and like they can actually make a difference. Then here over Guardian-land ft. Nolan North (Peter Dinklage was sent to an undisclosed location), you do actually play a major part as the main character! You appear in the cutscenes, you talk with leaders and kingship, you are the hero… but you are also just a hero. It’s like the game really wanted to put players at the forefront, but then it said ‘’oh shit wait, hold on a second’’ and realized that wasn’t going to cut it if they wanted to make players feel like this is an actual expansive universe, so your guy is just… there, present in the cutscenes, yeah, but with everyone else doing the major talking and exposition; there’s a ton lore and exposition, but there’s not much actual story. There’s a conflict, yeah, dark bad light good and all of that, Ghost and the other fellas aren’t shy on telling you why you need to go ‘’pew-pew’’ around the solar system, but there’s not actually much happening: no real character moments, no real feeling of advancement, you just party along and see what’s up, and at the end after killing the big bad you get a cool weapon that’s probably useless from a character that appears randomly like 4 times and… roll credits! It’s obvious that DLCs and expansions were always a own with this, but as it is, the thing that came in the disc back in 2014, it feels unfinished, rushed, and like it doesn’t really know what to do with its storyline aside of having you at the side so you can see the cool character you made alongside a bunch of people I don’t even remember the names of. The game is in this constant tug of war with itself, this conflict that loops forever, and one that had never a clear answer for. It’s a fun enough shooter with so many issues and half-baked stuff I fell I’ve left a ton yet to speak of, one that doesn’t even scrap that level of greatness it promised, one that is barely a shadow of what the studio probably wanted it to be…

Now, I’ve been the one telling you all of this, the me of 2023, the me 9 years after the game originally released, talking about the problems now I see with this game, as I were to play it for the first time now… but that’s not what happened… and my me of 2014 and my father had a whole other version to tell.

To be right there, not at they it launched or during the first months after the game’s release, but just there, sitting down in the couch, with the controller in my hands, and letting myself be completely immersed in these lost passages of a dying cosmos, seeing this larger than life of a decaying empire wither again only bathed by the light of stars or the last rays of sun after another day without hope, to explore them as I made my way through war and darkness with my father sitting by my side, also completely submerged in the game and handing him the controller in a part I just couldn’t beat or when he just wanted to explore somewhere, that is something I still cannot find the words for.

To adventure in the chasms of the moon and fight against the restless legions of the Hive as they charge using all the might I can muster, exploring the green yet lifeless overtaken jungle of Venus, facing monsters beyond what I could even call ‘’alien’’ and discovering what secrets lied beyond the rift and the oldest imaginable truth encrypted in the twisted form of the Vex. To explore a no man’s land only to find another random fellow guardian, to par against each other, or to, despite no words being able to be spoken, to communicate through each other with dances and gestures, only to go back to the Tower and encounter bigger groups of players, and interact with any tools available, to trade, to explore, to just have fun. To find constant tangible rewards that make you feel as if every small victory, every mission beaten, every level up, everything amounts to something, something worth of rewarding, and something that makes you feel stronger. To create your own adventures, to play alongside friends and help each other find things the other may have never heard about, and lose yourself in the exploration and the thrill of the fight.

To talk with my father about it, about how immensely unbelievable it all is, how incredibly amazing it is to reach a new planet every single time, to theory about what’s truly behind this story, and to see who can go without dying the longest.

And to be right there, at the door of another reality, facing off against the warlords of time and metal, to be unable to defeat the impossible alone, and for my father to pick up the controller and managing to defeat it, both celebrating it was done, we had beaten this grand, seemingly never-ending adventure, that is something I think I’ll never find the words to properly describe.

Destiny, in its earliest of days and for a specific type of player, is everything that a true videogame should be; a chance to explore the unknown and discover what so many couldn’t, and do venture alongside friends, fight alongside friends, fight against friends, perhaps even meet new friends, those are tales that the people that grew up with Destiny aren’t shy of speaking about. The moments I played with friends were few and far between back then, but for me, Destiny was always the game for me and my father to play, a game that managed to be everything that we could have ever dreamt of and beyond, a true consistent experience that gave us so many memorable moments it was truly hard to just stop playing after we have done so much, after we had been through so many space voyages. Destiny was a place for fight, but it also was a place for peace, to seeing the limits of the small little worlds; it may have never been everything that it promised, but it certainly felt like it.

Destiny, as a game, may be nothing more than an unremarkable experience.

…but its memories are irreplaceable.

Form 2016 onwards, my father’s love for the medium started to fade, while mine kept on going and my interest went even further beyond, and I can’t say for sure I would have given a try to other games so relatively soon, such as the likes of Doom (2016), if it wasn’t for it. And even after he stopped playing altogether my father still kept a huge appreciation for videogames, and he was more than happy tho help me expand my horizons: teaching me the ropes of certain series and genres, giving a chance to some fighting games to play them along side me, or details such as gifting Maio Odyssey the day it released, one before my birthday. The things he taught me, even the ones related to gaming, are still ones I’ve never forgotten, and through each and every point during out Destiny playthrough, the laughs, the conversations, the pure joy in the act of sharing a moment to play a game together, those are ones I won’t forget. Ones I never want to forget.

Soon, it’ll be 2 years since he passed away. Even now, saying and writing that feels surreal, like a nightmare that shouldn’t even be happening. But it did. With each day that follows, it doesn’t get easier. For a while I thought it never could. Some memories were even locked, remembrances that my brain decided to hide as to not hurt me, as maybe an attempt to try and make it easier. The memories of Destiny were among them, for a while I couldn’t even recall anything about the game, it just all felt too close, too real, a place forever gone, and knowing what that implied would just break me apart. But now I do know that to do that is nothing short of foolish, it might not get easy, but with each passing moment, with each day, I accept it, little by little, and I grab onto those memories. Memories worth cherishing. Memories worth celebrating. Memories that I’ll keep alive for as long I’m able to. I never want to forget Destiny, not only because it feels as if I’d forget a part of him, but also because those memories warm me, they make me happy, and I’m glad to still have them within me.

Tomorrow is Christmas day. It also would have been his birthday.

He always said he didn’t like Christmas much because it was also a reminder of how old he was getting. And I just wish he could have gotten older, that he could have seen more….

It’s during these days that those memories, and among them… memories of playing Destiny together, memories of celebrating together.

I wish I had a more concrete answer for what I’m trying to express, a true finality, but no amount of words could truly define it, and I guess there’s never really one to begin with, for worse… but also for better. I’ll move forward and I already do, not only for him, but for myself, I’ll carry those memories within me forever, as I form new ones. To everyone that has experienced loss, hold on tight to those memories, remember them with joy, ‘cause they are worth, and as you do it, keep on going. Not only for them. But for yourself.

Memories worth shedding a tear for.

Memories worth smiling for.

Stay safe and strong, everyone.

Happy holidays!

…and happy birthday, Dad.

I noticed a weird bug where the ball went through the paddles sometimes, the devs really should fix that on the next patch...

There's something so cosmically hilarious in the fact the CEO of Atari saw what would become one of the most influential piece of tech to ever be made as a ''fucking piece of trash'', and the main developer, Allan Alcorn, thought of it just as a side project where he did some things haphazardly to make his bosses weird-ass demands happy. It grounds the legend around Pong while being even more inspiring un a way.

It wasn't the first arcade machine, it wasn't the most creative thing you could do with the tech even back then, but damn if those beeps and boops aren't charming as hell and if playing alone isn't some of the most oddly interesting fun you could have with a game like this, even if sometimes hitting the ball when it respawns is even harder than when another player hits it back...

I could go on about Pong for 4000 words... except actually no, I couldn't; it's Pong, and beyond its unbelievably important historical value and rich history, it's still a game, and even more than half a century later, it still holds up as one.

A legacy that other games from back then and soon after do share, but one still worth praising nonetheless...