DeemonAndGames
2024
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.
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.
2009
Huge shout-out to @paq250_, with whom I played the entire campaign, and that made this whole experience 10 times more fun than it otherwise would have been, it was amazing to experience the sheer insanity and absurdity on display here alongside someone else, and let’s be real, probably the way this game was intended to be played. And despite how much I’m about to tear into it, I can say one thing for certain; it sure is a tolerable and, at best, fun co-op experience with some pretty tense moments and cool sections, especially when the two of us were separated and had to frantically find a way to save each other’s asses, which sometimes ended poorly since I can’t aim for shit.
There are some genuine smart decisions here and there: the down time feels like proper moments of respite, and it’s always exciting to see what’s new in the store and talk about what weapons each should carry and what strategies to follow after losing. So it is simply thinking on your feet, scrambling for any way to get out of a tough situation, and saving each other constantly, especially if there’s an enemy that has one-shot potential involved. There’s no master-class in design here, but still, even if shooting Lickers down while your buddy tries to access an out-of-reach area or getting the attention of a boss or strong enemy while the other tries to set up mines and explosives aren’t the most creative shit out there, they are nonetheless fun, and tense moments that work when being alongside someone to share them. Resident Evil 5 works as a co-op third person shooter game, that I can say for certain….
Doesn’t change the fact that this shit is ASS
I know this may sound rich coming from the guy who hasn’t beat any RE game till this one, but I’ve played and know enough about other RE games to confidently say that it astounds me how much RE5 misses the mark considering the potential it had and how it sacrifices the wonderful cheesiness of previous games for half-ass seriousness which doesn’t work at all. The concept of ‘’RE4 but Co-Op’’ is fucking amazing, and I understand that Capcom made this at it is, but in the process, they seemed to have forgotten everything that made that game, or any RE for that matter, interesting in the first place aside from the core shooting.
You only get 9 inventory spaces each, and even the size of times doesn’t factor in at all anymore, that just makes this inventory system less interesting out of the bat, and that’s on top of being a pretty cumbersome and limited system in a game that at times offers you too much loot and throws you into extremely hectic situations that don’t really let you stop and manage your items properly.
Puzzles are a huge letdown, and the fact they are even here boggles the mind. If they wanted to make a pure action game, sure, go for it, but then throwing in some puzzles that aren’t fun or interesting in the slightest just because it isn’t exactly fun. Hell, nw that I think about it, I don’t even know why you have to sell the treasures you get instead of getting the money automatically, since you can’t combine any items aside of healing herbs! The closest this game comes to creating an actual involved headscratcher is the classic ‘’you need x number of items to open this door’’, if only they didn’t have the most annoying hazards and the most questionable area designs, they may have even been pretty fun!
RE5 just seems eternally confused, not only by its existence as the next RE game, but also as a sequel to RE4 and even as a game on its own: Did you like the hooded man with a chainsaw from RE4? Well, he’s back, bois! Did you like the Gigante and the sea monster? Well, they are also back... in boring turret section form! How about unskippable, weird as hell cutscenes that feel like there should be a quick time event of sorts… except it isn’t? How about a story and tone that are... questionable, to say the least…
I swear, I haven’t felt so bewildered at a game as watching one of the fucking main characters talk about how horrible imperialism is and how the terrible practices of an American company have doomed an entire African company… only to massacre an entire population of tribesmen and steal every treasure you come across in the following chapter. Hell, you keep fighting them even in the chapter after that! Isn’t that neat and not at all questionable and horrifying?
Every time the game tried to make a statement of some sort regarding the horrors of neo-imperialism, I couldn’t get that out of my mind; the first two chapters and maybe the last two aren’t that bad in that regard, but 3 & 4 are heinous and kill every chance this game had at being a serious critique of sorts, more than the motorbike scene and the showcase of every single military-movie cliché possible, I mean.
And hey, even if chapters 5 & 6 aren’t horrible story-wise, they sure are gameplay-wise. It’s in these areas that the game is completely mind-numbing: before, you had some interesting vertical design or interesting areas and mazes, but now we have metal corridors and cover emphasis in cover mechanics and it’s… not good, to be honest. There are no opportunities to be stealthy in Licker encounters, most battles feel more frustrating than engaging, and it all starts feeling like a race to the finish line that lasts too long.
Even the bosses are pretty middling overall; the only ones I can call enjoyable are the first and last one, anything in between is a passable set piece at best and a boring bulled sponge at worst… scratch that, at worst is the fuCKING 5-2 BOSS OF MY FUCKING GOD. We spent more than half an hour wondering what we were doing wrong, ‘cause that piece of crap wouldn’t die except, no, we weren’t doing anything wrong, is just that bad of a fight that it takes an eternity to beat even if you set it aflame constantly, and it even reuses the fucking model of the first boss! HOW DID THIS SHIT GO PAST TESTING??????
I can get mad all day, but honestly, RE5 isn’t terrible most of the time, just incredibly basic and full of mistakes that bog down the overall experience, and it’s sad that I have to say this; this was one of the games I vividly remember watching my father play all those years back. Should I have him play that game at such a young age? Probably not! But still, RE5 was the first RE game I ever came into contact with, and it’s sad to finally arrive at it and encounter a product that can be so inferior to what came before while trying to replicate exactly that, and how it manages to be the most predictable and by the number of things ever while also being spectacularly terrible at times… and honestly? That may be the thing that gives it charm.
I can’t stress how much me and Paq laughed at the motorbike cutscene, how we lost our minds at the punch and kick animations, how much we laughed after finding out a way to one shot that shitty 5-2 boss, and how worth the whole journey was to see Chris punching that damn rock and Western yeeting us to a fucking volcano. The game is not cheesy, it’s a joke, one that’s still funny nonetheless, and despite it all, it somehow had fun to offer, both intentionally and unintentionally.
RE5 may be generic, but there ain’t anything quite like it… And maybe that’s for the best, but hey, the guy punches a rock! Funniest shit I ever se-
There are some genuine smart decisions here and there: the down time feels like proper moments of respite, and it’s always exciting to see what’s new in the store and talk about what weapons each should carry and what strategies to follow after losing. So it is simply thinking on your feet, scrambling for any way to get out of a tough situation, and saving each other constantly, especially if there’s an enemy that has one-shot potential involved. There’s no master-class in design here, but still, even if shooting Lickers down while your buddy tries to access an out-of-reach area or getting the attention of a boss or strong enemy while the other tries to set up mines and explosives aren’t the most creative shit out there, they are nonetheless fun, and tense moments that work when being alongside someone to share them. Resident Evil 5 works as a co-op third person shooter game, that I can say for certain….
Doesn’t change the fact that this shit is ASS
I know this may sound rich coming from the guy who hasn’t beat any RE game till this one, but I’ve played and know enough about other RE games to confidently say that it astounds me how much RE5 misses the mark considering the potential it had and how it sacrifices the wonderful cheesiness of previous games for half-ass seriousness which doesn’t work at all. The concept of ‘’RE4 but Co-Op’’ is fucking amazing, and I understand that Capcom made this at it is, but in the process, they seemed to have forgotten everything that made that game, or any RE for that matter, interesting in the first place aside from the core shooting.
You only get 9 inventory spaces each, and even the size of times doesn’t factor in at all anymore, that just makes this inventory system less interesting out of the bat, and that’s on top of being a pretty cumbersome and limited system in a game that at times offers you too much loot and throws you into extremely hectic situations that don’t really let you stop and manage your items properly.
Puzzles are a huge letdown, and the fact they are even here boggles the mind. If they wanted to make a pure action game, sure, go for it, but then throwing in some puzzles that aren’t fun or interesting in the slightest just because it isn’t exactly fun. Hell, nw that I think about it, I don’t even know why you have to sell the treasures you get instead of getting the money automatically, since you can’t combine any items aside of healing herbs! The closest this game comes to creating an actual involved headscratcher is the classic ‘’you need x number of items to open this door’’, if only they didn’t have the most annoying hazards and the most questionable area designs, they may have even been pretty fun!
RE5 just seems eternally confused, not only by its existence as the next RE game, but also as a sequel to RE4 and even as a game on its own: Did you like the hooded man with a chainsaw from RE4? Well, he’s back, bois! Did you like the Gigante and the sea monster? Well, they are also back... in boring turret section form! How about unskippable, weird as hell cutscenes that feel like there should be a quick time event of sorts… except it isn’t? How about a story and tone that are... questionable, to say the least…
I swear, I haven’t felt so bewildered at a game as watching one of the fucking main characters talk about how horrible imperialism is and how the terrible practices of an American company have doomed an entire African company… only to massacre an entire population of tribesmen and steal every treasure you come across in the following chapter. Hell, you keep fighting them even in the chapter after that! Isn’t that neat and not at all questionable and horrifying?
Every time the game tried to make a statement of some sort regarding the horrors of neo-imperialism, I couldn’t get that out of my mind; the first two chapters and maybe the last two aren’t that bad in that regard, but 3 & 4 are heinous and kill every chance this game had at being a serious critique of sorts, more than the motorbike scene and the showcase of every single military-movie cliché possible, I mean.
And hey, even if chapters 5 & 6 aren’t horrible story-wise, they sure are gameplay-wise. It’s in these areas that the game is completely mind-numbing: before, you had some interesting vertical design or interesting areas and mazes, but now we have metal corridors and cover emphasis in cover mechanics and it’s… not good, to be honest. There are no opportunities to be stealthy in Licker encounters, most battles feel more frustrating than engaging, and it all starts feeling like a race to the finish line that lasts too long.
Even the bosses are pretty middling overall; the only ones I can call enjoyable are the first and last one, anything in between is a passable set piece at best and a boring bulled sponge at worst… scratch that, at worst is the fuCKING 5-2 BOSS OF MY FUCKING GOD. We spent more than half an hour wondering what we were doing wrong, ‘cause that piece of crap wouldn’t die except, no, we weren’t doing anything wrong, is just that bad of a fight that it takes an eternity to beat even if you set it aflame constantly, and it even reuses the fucking model of the first boss! HOW DID THIS SHIT GO PAST TESTING??????
I can get mad all day, but honestly, RE5 isn’t terrible most of the time, just incredibly basic and full of mistakes that bog down the overall experience, and it’s sad that I have to say this; this was one of the games I vividly remember watching my father play all those years back. Should I have him play that game at such a young age? Probably not! But still, RE5 was the first RE game I ever came into contact with, and it’s sad to finally arrive at it and encounter a product that can be so inferior to what came before while trying to replicate exactly that, and how it manages to be the most predictable and by the number of things ever while also being spectacularly terrible at times… and honestly? That may be the thing that gives it charm.
I can’t stress how much me and Paq laughed at the motorbike cutscene, how we lost our minds at the punch and kick animations, how much we laughed after finding out a way to one shot that shitty 5-2 boss, and how worth the whole journey was to see Chris punching that damn rock and Western yeeting us to a fucking volcano. The game is not cheesy, it’s a joke, one that’s still funny nonetheless, and despite it all, it somehow had fun to offer, both intentionally and unintentionally.
RE5 may be generic, but there ain’t anything quite like it… And maybe that’s for the best, but hey, the guy punches a rock! Funniest shit I ever se-
1989
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…
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…
1995
Mf thinks life is all sunshine and rainbows
Despite my fondness for the Kirby series and the pink ball’s equally adorable friends, it’s kind of surprising how I haven’t played many of this cute eldritch horror’s older adventures. Case and point, it was only relatively recently that I finally played Kirby’s Dream Land, and while it was certainly a simple and fun enough adventure —and a necessary stepping stone all things considered—, it didn’t quite click with me the same it does for others. It has its moments and highlights, like the shoot ‘em up boss fight, and as a short, easy-to-access platformer, it does a good job, but I find it reaaaaally hard to get invested in its not-so great levels, and Adventure’s existence and how fun and complete that game feels while also accomplishing everything Dream Land does doesn’t exactly help things.
All this to say I had no clue what to expect from the sequel; I knew I had to play this, this is the first outing in Shinichi Shimomura’s less action oriented take on Kirby compared with what Sakurai would end up pursuing in Super Star and that fact alone made it far more interesting, and I also knew some other things here and there, like the fact it features copy abilities and what-not, but overall… Yeah, I didn’t know much about aside from ‘’this is the direct continuation to Dream Land’’. I wasn’t expecting anything bad, hell, I don’t even consider the original game a bad work at all, but I would lie if I said I had high expectations going in…
… so what if I told you I kinda really jammed with this game?
I… Wow, if we see this and the two previous games and some sort of original trilogy, then the evolution is clear as day; as I said, I knew this game lifted some elements from Adventure like the copy abilities, but I never expected to see so many translated so well to the charming brick that is the Game Boy. Levels once again have the adorable introductory cutscenes, but instead of being limited to one-stage run-throughs, there are actual defined hub-worlds, and while there’s less optional stuff than in Adventure (by less, I mean none), the hub areas themselves feel much more compacted and representative of the world they are set in, and it’s hard to describe how, but these areas and the game as a whole manage to feel very lively despite normally featuring no color at all.
And on the levels themselves… You can play as a hamster, so I think that says more than enough. The original Dream Land attempted things such as vertical challenges and annoying mazes, and while those are very much present here, they are accompanied by far more interesting overall lay-outs; the game is still easy, but beating the stages feel like an accomplishment either way thanks to the more varied and fitting challenges, mini-bosses that are actually super fun, and a but more of a puzzle-like feeling thanks to the collectables and the varying paths.
There are still 1ups here and there, but the existence of star bits and being rewarded with a life after collecting enough is a incredibly simple change that goes a long way in encouraging you to approach the stages in a slower-paced, different way, and that’s not even getting into the main collectables that give you the real ending.
Most of the stuff in or added to Dream Land 2 seems like the most basic shit imaginable, and maybe it is, but it’s all done with such care and intent that it’s hard to not be profoundly enthralled by simply getting a new power-up or uncovering a secret. The design, the animations, so reminiscent of both games that came before yet even more adorable, and charming, even the music for crying out loud! Most are rather short loops, sure, but what they lack in length, they deliver in quality, have you even heard Coo’s theme? You know this bird is the real deal when this starts playing.
Oh, that reminds me of the friend animals, actually… Nah, just kidding, I could never forget Rick and his incredibly silly dance, I smiled so much when I saw the lil’ guy go… Rick, Coo, and Kine are so much more than what they seem at first; they aren’t only funny fellas that give new ways to move around, they are also broken as hell in every sense of the word! Each power-up acts different depending if you are accompanied by them or not, and they are pretty much the key to finding the game’s more hidden secrets, and… I don’t know man, they are just so much fun to play as and make you view levels in a completely different way.
Out of the bunch, Kine is probably the least useful: his land movement is ass and pretty frustrating, and it’s not like it makes swimming easier than it already is, and getting him without the possibility of getting rid of it can make certain sections into a nightmare. Other than that, they are genius additions that not only seem like an inspiration for the sections in Kirby 64 alongside other friends of Kirby and even the ability combination mechanic, but also feel like a sort of preview for the far more complex move-sets Super Star would give us.
It's a super charming and fun experience that only has two big problems, those being The Iceberg and the Dark Castle; the former is an ice world, and even tho that alone doesn’t have to mean anything negative, it sadly has some of the most annoying, stressful, and frustrating levels in the entire game, with a vertical sections that is either the easiest thing ever or the most bullshit platformer challenge I’ve ever tried depending on if you have an animal pal or not. And the latter is relying solely in drawn out sections that aren’t that fun to begin with and content to see in other worlds, which is a huge shame considering how cool the whole setting is. Two whole worlds that drag down what’s otherwise a fun and wonderfully simple platformer, it's still Kirby after all, but what intrigues me is how it manages to be Kirby, if that makes sense.
It's clear to me now how much this game not only would highly influence both Dream Land 3 and 64, but after also the Kirby series in general: other playable characters aside of the main puffball, puzzle-like elements and collectables that would return at full force in the modern 2D games, the long running tradition of Dedede getting possessed, and the beginning of the whole Kirby background story as we know it. What surprises me is not so much that it introduces these elements, but just how well they work right here, right now.
It's true that it has two worlds that feel like a bit of a chore, it’s true that most of the puzzle can be summarized as ‘’you need x ability to break x block’’, it’s true that it borrows a ton from Adventure, and all of that matters, but it also matters just how much of a fun and well-thought out adventure this is. I’ve used the word ‘’charm’’ a couple of times, but it’s the word that defines it best….
Also, if the three animal fellas don’t appear in the next 3D Kirby game (If there is one) I will RIOT, I NEED MORE OF THESE ADORABLE MACHINES OF DESTRUCTION AND THEIR SILLY DANCES, DAMMIT!
Despite my fondness for the Kirby series and the pink ball’s equally adorable friends, it’s kind of surprising how I haven’t played many of this cute eldritch horror’s older adventures. Case and point, it was only relatively recently that I finally played Kirby’s Dream Land, and while it was certainly a simple and fun enough adventure —and a necessary stepping stone all things considered—, it didn’t quite click with me the same it does for others. It has its moments and highlights, like the shoot ‘em up boss fight, and as a short, easy-to-access platformer, it does a good job, but I find it reaaaaally hard to get invested in its not-so great levels, and Adventure’s existence and how fun and complete that game feels while also accomplishing everything Dream Land does doesn’t exactly help things.
All this to say I had no clue what to expect from the sequel; I knew I had to play this, this is the first outing in Shinichi Shimomura’s less action oriented take on Kirby compared with what Sakurai would end up pursuing in Super Star and that fact alone made it far more interesting, and I also knew some other things here and there, like the fact it features copy abilities and what-not, but overall… Yeah, I didn’t know much about aside from ‘’this is the direct continuation to Dream Land’’. I wasn’t expecting anything bad, hell, I don’t even consider the original game a bad work at all, but I would lie if I said I had high expectations going in…
… so what if I told you I kinda really jammed with this game?
I… Wow, if we see this and the two previous games and some sort of original trilogy, then the evolution is clear as day; as I said, I knew this game lifted some elements from Adventure like the copy abilities, but I never expected to see so many translated so well to the charming brick that is the Game Boy. Levels once again have the adorable introductory cutscenes, but instead of being limited to one-stage run-throughs, there are actual defined hub-worlds, and while there’s less optional stuff than in Adventure (by less, I mean none), the hub areas themselves feel much more compacted and representative of the world they are set in, and it’s hard to describe how, but these areas and the game as a whole manage to feel very lively despite normally featuring no color at all.
And on the levels themselves… You can play as a hamster, so I think that says more than enough. The original Dream Land attempted things such as vertical challenges and annoying mazes, and while those are very much present here, they are accompanied by far more interesting overall lay-outs; the game is still easy, but beating the stages feel like an accomplishment either way thanks to the more varied and fitting challenges, mini-bosses that are actually super fun, and a but more of a puzzle-like feeling thanks to the collectables and the varying paths.
There are still 1ups here and there, but the existence of star bits and being rewarded with a life after collecting enough is a incredibly simple change that goes a long way in encouraging you to approach the stages in a slower-paced, different way, and that’s not even getting into the main collectables that give you the real ending.
Most of the stuff in or added to Dream Land 2 seems like the most basic shit imaginable, and maybe it is, but it’s all done with such care and intent that it’s hard to not be profoundly enthralled by simply getting a new power-up or uncovering a secret. The design, the animations, so reminiscent of both games that came before yet even more adorable, and charming, even the music for crying out loud! Most are rather short loops, sure, but what they lack in length, they deliver in quality, have you even heard Coo’s theme? You know this bird is the real deal when this starts playing.
Oh, that reminds me of the friend animals, actually… Nah, just kidding, I could never forget Rick and his incredibly silly dance, I smiled so much when I saw the lil’ guy go… Rick, Coo, and Kine are so much more than what they seem at first; they aren’t only funny fellas that give new ways to move around, they are also broken as hell in every sense of the word! Each power-up acts different depending if you are accompanied by them or not, and they are pretty much the key to finding the game’s more hidden secrets, and… I don’t know man, they are just so much fun to play as and make you view levels in a completely different way.
Out of the bunch, Kine is probably the least useful: his land movement is ass and pretty frustrating, and it’s not like it makes swimming easier than it already is, and getting him without the possibility of getting rid of it can make certain sections into a nightmare. Other than that, they are genius additions that not only seem like an inspiration for the sections in Kirby 64 alongside other friends of Kirby and even the ability combination mechanic, but also feel like a sort of preview for the far more complex move-sets Super Star would give us.
It's a super charming and fun experience that only has two big problems, those being The Iceberg and the Dark Castle; the former is an ice world, and even tho that alone doesn’t have to mean anything negative, it sadly has some of the most annoying, stressful, and frustrating levels in the entire game, with a vertical sections that is either the easiest thing ever or the most bullshit platformer challenge I’ve ever tried depending on if you have an animal pal or not. And the latter is relying solely in drawn out sections that aren’t that fun to begin with and content to see in other worlds, which is a huge shame considering how cool the whole setting is. Two whole worlds that drag down what’s otherwise a fun and wonderfully simple platformer, it's still Kirby after all, but what intrigues me is how it manages to be Kirby, if that makes sense.
It's clear to me now how much this game not only would highly influence both Dream Land 3 and 64, but after also the Kirby series in general: other playable characters aside of the main puffball, puzzle-like elements and collectables that would return at full force in the modern 2D games, the long running tradition of Dedede getting possessed, and the beginning of the whole Kirby background story as we know it. What surprises me is not so much that it introduces these elements, but just how well they work right here, right now.
It's true that it has two worlds that feel like a bit of a chore, it’s true that most of the puzzle can be summarized as ‘’you need x ability to break x block’’, it’s true that it borrows a ton from Adventure, and all of that matters, but it also matters just how much of a fun and well-thought out adventure this is. I’ve used the word ‘’charm’’ a couple of times, but it’s the word that defines it best….
Also, if the three animal fellas don’t appear in the next 3D Kirby game (If there is one) I will RIOT, I NEED MORE OF THESE ADORABLE MACHINES OF DESTRUCTION AND THEIR SILLY DANCES, DAMMIT!
I have no idea why, but for some reason, every time I play one of Tour's tracks, I nail it, I’m not even close at being the best Mario Kart player at my friend group but I always land first in those… never in my life I’ve been so disappointed for being good at something.
This was actually the very first thing I played this year, going through all the cups with some friends on the night of January 1st, however, I decided to hold on talking about since I knew I wanted to get gold and experience them myself alone ‘cause I l knew that playing one after the other in one night while having a laugh will pals would be a completely different experience from slowly taking the courses in and playing them all in other while trying out the online and even more of the co-op, and boy oh boy was I right.
One thing I’ll give the Booster Course Pass as a whole is that is a joy to play through with friends, I mean duh, this is Mario Kart after all, but still, compared to other games in the series or even base Mario Kart 8/ 8 Deluxe, this is one of the few times where it feels wrong to not play at least three or four cups in succession when being with some pals. At first, I thought the reason for it was simply because of the novelty of the but after playing this whole thing in order I see the hold this can have; it’s almost addicting playing this whole thing, and ironically, I feel partly of that is because how poorly it starts off.
Wave 1 of the DLC is the single most underwhelming Mario Kart experience I’ve ever had; the track selection is mediocre at best and actually baffling at worst, visually it’s a far cry from the base experience —tho that can be said about the whole DLC or at least most of it, but it does get better as it goes on so there’s that—, some of the changes in the returning courses either don’t make anything to make them more interesting or at times they are for the worst, and to be completely honest, they couldn’t have picked a worst selection of courses from Tour to start things off, the first impression they give is abominable… but it actually gets real good real fast.
I imagine those that paid for the DLC day one must have had the sour taste way longer, but as someone that played the whole thing at its complete state, it’s super surprising just how much everything improves, to the point that by Wave 3 and onwards, the only Cup I’d call ‘’weak’’ is the Cherry Cup, and even then, it’s still pretty fun at times.
The selection of returning tracks gets better and better, the visuals and specially the sounds are even more of a joy with each passing cup, hell, even tho I started this review mocking them, some of the later Tour tracks were pretty stellar! And we even get some new playable characters which, in my opinion, round the roster perfectly, and I couldn’t be happier to finally see ma boi Wiggler playable again, and we finally have Petey and King Boo in the same game again! The boys, together at last!
The new courses couldn’t have surprised me more for the better oif they wanted to; there are some on the weaker side like the Ice Cream one, but Yoshi’s Island alone is probably in my top 5 of favorite tracks in general, and hell, as much shade as I’ve thrown Wave 1, Ninja Hideaway isn’t that far off either, and it alone makes the first two cups much more bearable.
The joy of returning to the Rainbow Courses of old, seeing so many new places and the returning ones given some pretty amazing changes (running on the rails of Kalimari Damazy was simply amazing), there’s something in here that shows nothing but care and passion, and makes me wish they could have had more time in the oven from the start, ‘cause most of this is truly excellent.
There are still flaws; it relays too much of city courses, every GBA course remake feels like a flip coin between it being the best thing ever or total bullshit, there are some major omissions while also other tracks that would have benefited from some changes… but at the same time, no other collection of tracks has left me and my friends wanting for more, to play more, to see more great courses or the promise of better ones in future cups.
At worst is middling or disappointing, but at best is stellar and pure fun, kinda makes me wish we also go more Battle Courses honestly, we got a entire race course based on a bathroom, so imagine the possibilities!
Also, now that the URSS is canon in the Mario Universe, by proxy that means all bootleg Mario games released on the Dendy also are. Sorry, I don’t make the rules, Somari will appear in Mario Kart 9 for sure…
This was actually the very first thing I played this year, going through all the cups with some friends on the night of January 1st, however, I decided to hold on talking about since I knew I wanted to get gold and experience them myself alone ‘cause I l knew that playing one after the other in one night while having a laugh will pals would be a completely different experience from slowly taking the courses in and playing them all in other while trying out the online and even more of the co-op, and boy oh boy was I right.
One thing I’ll give the Booster Course Pass as a whole is that is a joy to play through with friends, I mean duh, this is Mario Kart after all, but still, compared to other games in the series or even base Mario Kart 8/ 8 Deluxe, this is one of the few times where it feels wrong to not play at least three or four cups in succession when being with some pals. At first, I thought the reason for it was simply because of the novelty of the but after playing this whole thing in order I see the hold this can have; it’s almost addicting playing this whole thing, and ironically, I feel partly of that is because how poorly it starts off.
Wave 1 of the DLC is the single most underwhelming Mario Kart experience I’ve ever had; the track selection is mediocre at best and actually baffling at worst, visually it’s a far cry from the base experience —tho that can be said about the whole DLC or at least most of it, but it does get better as it goes on so there’s that—, some of the changes in the returning courses either don’t make anything to make them more interesting or at times they are for the worst, and to be completely honest, they couldn’t have picked a worst selection of courses from Tour to start things off, the first impression they give is abominable… but it actually gets real good real fast.
I imagine those that paid for the DLC day one must have had the sour taste way longer, but as someone that played the whole thing at its complete state, it’s super surprising just how much everything improves, to the point that by Wave 3 and onwards, the only Cup I’d call ‘’weak’’ is the Cherry Cup, and even then, it’s still pretty fun at times.
The selection of returning tracks gets better and better, the visuals and specially the sounds are even more of a joy with each passing cup, hell, even tho I started this review mocking them, some of the later Tour tracks were pretty stellar! And we even get some new playable characters which, in my opinion, round the roster perfectly, and I couldn’t be happier to finally see ma boi Wiggler playable again, and we finally have Petey and King Boo in the same game again! The boys, together at last!
The new courses couldn’t have surprised me more for the better oif they wanted to; there are some on the weaker side like the Ice Cream one, but Yoshi’s Island alone is probably in my top 5 of favorite tracks in general, and hell, as much shade as I’ve thrown Wave 1, Ninja Hideaway isn’t that far off either, and it alone makes the first two cups much more bearable.
The joy of returning to the Rainbow Courses of old, seeing so many new places and the returning ones given some pretty amazing changes (running on the rails of Kalimari Damazy was simply amazing), there’s something in here that shows nothing but care and passion, and makes me wish they could have had more time in the oven from the start, ‘cause most of this is truly excellent.
There are still flaws; it relays too much of city courses, every GBA course remake feels like a flip coin between it being the best thing ever or total bullshit, there are some major omissions while also other tracks that would have benefited from some changes… but at the same time, no other collection of tracks has left me and my friends wanting for more, to play more, to see more great courses or the promise of better ones in future cups.
At worst is middling or disappointing, but at best is stellar and pure fun, kinda makes me wish we also go more Battle Courses honestly, we got a entire race course based on a bathroom, so imagine the possibilities!
Also, now that the URSS is canon in the Mario Universe, by proxy that means all bootleg Mario games released on the Dendy also are. Sorry, I don’t make the rules, Somari will appear in Mario Kart 9 for sure…
I feel so sorry for all non-Spanish speakers who will never understand just how funny the name ‘’Señor Chirridos’’ is; like… is not a bad translation of Mr. Scratch by any means, but it’s so fucking funny and it surprises me even more they just didn’t keep the original name… but I’m so glad they didn’t.
If Alan Wake is the main TV series, then American Nightmare feels like a Halloween special, which seems to be exactly what they were going for. Despite the original game having such an open finale and this going directly after it, it doesn’t really build upon the pre-established narrative beyond Alan’s character and his conflict with his doppelgänger, and that’s fine! I’m totally up for a shorter, more fast-paced story in this world, and American Nightmare does have a super interesting premise.
I actually liked how the combat worked in the first game, so expanding on that with more weapons and enemies while using the backdrop of a Night Springs episode and introducing a time-loop is the kind of craziness I can get behind, and AM does succeed at creating more interesting combat encounters than the original game ever did… but doesn’t try to go for more than that despite its many opportunities.
It does show a promising start; the three main areas of Arizona are interesting and fun to go through and a perfect excuse to battle the Taken, getting more manuscript pages, see more of Mr. Scratch and the little interactions with each of the characters, while not as natural as any of the conversations with the fellas of Bright Falls, are pretty neat. With the addition of a couple of weapons and enemies, this feels like the kind of combat sections they wanted to make the first time around; they even took out the driving section! We are freed from this accursed blight!
And we even get to hear how Barry and the Old Gods of Asgard are doing, glad to know they are still putting out pure fire!
It’s a pretty good time, a simple one, but it has some cool moments, I really liked the battles, and overall is just an entertaining time!... and then the second loop begins.
I absolutely love the idea of time-loops as a gameplay system, getting to learn more of the world and levels and using that knowledge to do tasks way faster and m is the best, however, poorly implemented time-loops can turn into doing the exact same thing x amount of times only with a different objective or two and with some new enemies… guess what American Nightmare decides to do. Each time loop is shorter than the last one, but not because you actively take decisions that make things speed up, but because either what were multiple objectives is only one now or because a NPC did the thing way before you. It doesn’t help that the major set-pieces don’t change at all; watching the petrol extractor is a cool sequence, but not one I would have liked to go through three times, and no, putting rock songs, as good as hey sound, doesn’t make it different or better.
Going through the motions the first time was fine, but having to walk through the same rope two other times is a chore, even if gets shorter every time. Worst part is that they really could have given you more openness if they really wanted; the NPCs you encounter also remember the time loops and no matter what, you can only truly win at the end of the last one, so diving you more lenience on how you deal with things wouldn’t have really affected thing at all, and we have here is just an excuse to turn 3 levels into 9.
As the loops go on, more enemies get introduced, and… listen, I really do like the combat way more on here, and some of the new enemies are pretty interesting; the Taken that throws projectiles and explosives and the one that divides each time you shine light on him are super cool ideas from a gameplay-wise and as ideas on their own but the rest of them… in many ways they feel like a waste. The enemies that replace the birds from the original game are faster to deal with but just as annoying, the giants are bullet sponges with no interest move-sets on their own, and the spiders are cool story wise, since they apparently are not part of the Taken perse and instead are part of the Dark Place fauna, but they being just big spiders feels like a wasted opportunity to create something way more cool and alien, and alsoWHY THE FUCK DID THEY HAVE TO BE SPIDERS OH MY GOD-
American Nightmare doesn’t create challenges by throwing enemies with interesting sets of moves, it just throws at you guys that really know how to take damage or a ton of them at the same time, best exemplified on the Arcade mode. I do know and understand that this is a more gameplay-focused entry, but when in the main story you go through the same beats over and over with some minor alterations, and the arcade mode —which by the way, has some unique level themes that I would have preferred to see much more in the main story instead of going through the Observatory three times — is just Wake against waves of enemies and see what score you can get… at a certain point the game loses me, and it doesn’t pull from the creativeness that I know it has and can have to keep me glued to it.
The Taken stay completely silent, and the creepy charm that was found on hearing their grunts and lines amongst the trees is completely gone; the manuscript pages are way less interesting this time around, and the opportunity of this being based around and taking place in a Night Springs episode Alan wrote isn’t taken advantage of at any point, making for a way less interesting story, and use of the reality- bending pages.
In the end, the thing that really kept me more intrigued and wanting to see the game to the finale was, who else, Mr. Scratch himself. I enjoyed most of the villains in the original Alan Wake, but NONE feel like Mr. Scratch; the sound distorting every time Wake says his name, the way he taunts Alan and how he ENJOYS being the worst of him, a true monster all the way through, it’s a disturbing delight every time he’s on screen (literally) and the uneasiness he carries is one I didn’t expected to be done so well. I wished he and Alan had more opportunities to bounce each other, ‘cause every time they did it was a delight, and luckily it seems that American Nightmare isn’t that important to the overall Alan Wake narrative, so hopefully he didn’t kick the bucket, I’d love to see more of him…
There’s still that Alan Wake attention to detail and story in here, but it didn’t go as deep as it could have, and we have is a story that, while fun at times and with some cool extras and secrets, it still is what is: a Halloween special that doesn’t want to be a real successor or groundbreaking, but it also doesn’t take advantage of the potential it itself sets, and it can drag on at times… Still fun and funny at times, tho!
We’ll meet again, Champion of Light
I’ll see you soon, Herald of Darkness
If Alan Wake is the main TV series, then American Nightmare feels like a Halloween special, which seems to be exactly what they were going for. Despite the original game having such an open finale and this going directly after it, it doesn’t really build upon the pre-established narrative beyond Alan’s character and his conflict with his doppelgänger, and that’s fine! I’m totally up for a shorter, more fast-paced story in this world, and American Nightmare does have a super interesting premise.
I actually liked how the combat worked in the first game, so expanding on that with more weapons and enemies while using the backdrop of a Night Springs episode and introducing a time-loop is the kind of craziness I can get behind, and AM does succeed at creating more interesting combat encounters than the original game ever did… but doesn’t try to go for more than that despite its many opportunities.
It does show a promising start; the three main areas of Arizona are interesting and fun to go through and a perfect excuse to battle the Taken, getting more manuscript pages, see more of Mr. Scratch and the little interactions with each of the characters, while not as natural as any of the conversations with the fellas of Bright Falls, are pretty neat. With the addition of a couple of weapons and enemies, this feels like the kind of combat sections they wanted to make the first time around; they even took out the driving section! We are freed from this accursed blight!
And we even get to hear how Barry and the Old Gods of Asgard are doing, glad to know they are still putting out pure fire!
It’s a pretty good time, a simple one, but it has some cool moments, I really liked the battles, and overall is just an entertaining time!... and then the second loop begins.
I absolutely love the idea of time-loops as a gameplay system, getting to learn more of the world and levels and using that knowledge to do tasks way faster and m is the best, however, poorly implemented time-loops can turn into doing the exact same thing x amount of times only with a different objective or two and with some new enemies… guess what American Nightmare decides to do. Each time loop is shorter than the last one, but not because you actively take decisions that make things speed up, but because either what were multiple objectives is only one now or because a NPC did the thing way before you. It doesn’t help that the major set-pieces don’t change at all; watching the petrol extractor is a cool sequence, but not one I would have liked to go through three times, and no, putting rock songs, as good as hey sound, doesn’t make it different or better.
Going through the motions the first time was fine, but having to walk through the same rope two other times is a chore, even if gets shorter every time. Worst part is that they really could have given you more openness if they really wanted; the NPCs you encounter also remember the time loops and no matter what, you can only truly win at the end of the last one, so diving you more lenience on how you deal with things wouldn’t have really affected thing at all, and we have here is just an excuse to turn 3 levels into 9.
As the loops go on, more enemies get introduced, and… listen, I really do like the combat way more on here, and some of the new enemies are pretty interesting; the Taken that throws projectiles and explosives and the one that divides each time you shine light on him are super cool ideas from a gameplay-wise and as ideas on their own but the rest of them… in many ways they feel like a waste. The enemies that replace the birds from the original game are faster to deal with but just as annoying, the giants are bullet sponges with no interest move-sets on their own, and the spiders are cool story wise, since they apparently are not part of the Taken perse and instead are part of the Dark Place fauna, but they being just big spiders feels like a wasted opportunity to create something way more cool and alien, and alsoWHY THE FUCK DID THEY HAVE TO BE SPIDERS OH MY GOD-
American Nightmare doesn’t create challenges by throwing enemies with interesting sets of moves, it just throws at you guys that really know how to take damage or a ton of them at the same time, best exemplified on the Arcade mode. I do know and understand that this is a more gameplay-focused entry, but when in the main story you go through the same beats over and over with some minor alterations, and the arcade mode —which by the way, has some unique level themes that I would have preferred to see much more in the main story instead of going through the Observatory three times — is just Wake against waves of enemies and see what score you can get… at a certain point the game loses me, and it doesn’t pull from the creativeness that I know it has and can have to keep me glued to it.
The Taken stay completely silent, and the creepy charm that was found on hearing their grunts and lines amongst the trees is completely gone; the manuscript pages are way less interesting this time around, and the opportunity of this being based around and taking place in a Night Springs episode Alan wrote isn’t taken advantage of at any point, making for a way less interesting story, and use of the reality- bending pages.
In the end, the thing that really kept me more intrigued and wanting to see the game to the finale was, who else, Mr. Scratch himself. I enjoyed most of the villains in the original Alan Wake, but NONE feel like Mr. Scratch; the sound distorting every time Wake says his name, the way he taunts Alan and how he ENJOYS being the worst of him, a true monster all the way through, it’s a disturbing delight every time he’s on screen (literally) and the uneasiness he carries is one I didn’t expected to be done so well. I wished he and Alan had more opportunities to bounce each other, ‘cause every time they did it was a delight, and luckily it seems that American Nightmare isn’t that important to the overall Alan Wake narrative, so hopefully he didn’t kick the bucket, I’d love to see more of him…
There’s still that Alan Wake attention to detail and story in here, but it didn’t go as deep as it could have, and we have is a story that, while fun at times and with some cool extras and secrets, it still is what is: a Halloween special that doesn’t want to be a real successor or groundbreaking, but it also doesn’t take advantage of the potential it itself sets, and it can drag on at times… Still fun and funny at times, tho!
We’ll meet again, Champion of Light
I’ll see you soon, Herald of Darkness
Maybe one day, you’ll remember this place…
A Link to the Past starts on a stormy night...
I actually never have beaten any 2D Zelda games until now, for reasons that are a story for another time, but I have played an tried quiet a ton of them, some until the half-way point or even a bit after that, and the one thing they all share in common is how well they sell this larger than life epic, an adventure with its silly moments, but that it still feels consistently ‘’grand’’, and the menace of evil looming over the heads of everyone in Hyrule. This isn’t a complain, not in the slightest, and that isn’t the reasons I didn’t see any of those games to the finale, is just a part of their identity, like the dungeons, vast worlds opened by upgrades, and Octorocks…
Link’s Awakening begins on the quiet coast…
…But Koholint Island felt different. It still has the many dungeons with their bosses —some being not that great to be honest, at best they end too soon and at worst they are slow or overly simple—, it still has the usual items and upgrades, it has a TON of Octorocks ; in many ways, it still has the mark of 2D Zelda…only instead of feeling like an epic , at times it feels closer to a fairy tale.
Mist forest filled with secret passages and tricker raccoons, songs of fishes and frogs that give new life to what has been gone for a really long time, and what’s perhaps one of the funniest side quests in any game that’s essentially just an item-trade hunt, but it goes on and on across the entire island and your final reward is basically getting two items and scammed, it’s amazing!
There’s a joy to be found in the island, be it the in the little chats with the weird folk or the great search for the color dungeon; even when you aren’t at one of the incredible dungeons, which from a design perspective are the most fun I’ve had with 2D Zelda ever, I never felt like I was losing time or getting side-tracked. The little things like walking a Chomp-Chomp around and playing a crane machine feel just as important as getting the fabled legendary instruments, so mundane but at the same time so mysterious, so fun, so dream-like.
The diorama comparison was also completely on purpose, the toy-like feeling the remake offers is nothing short of amazing, everything feels made out of plastic and clay in such a purposeful way I got nothing but praise for it, and playing through this world reminded me of the tales I made while playing with my tales, distant memories flourishing amidst a world full of wonder and shells.
It sucks that it comes to a price; the game’s frames tank… a LOT, sometimes in the dungeons, but mostly out in the open, and it’s pretty noticeable. I understand that running a completely ‘’open’’ island with such wonderful visuals would have its consequences on performance but I would lie if I said it sometimes felt a lit too much, and I’m left wondering if maybe a bit more time in the oven or a patch or two would have helped things, ‘cause as it is it can feel jarring and take you out of the dream.
It's honestly a bit of a weird remake at times; the fact the jump item isn’t immediately binded to a button permanently boggles my mind considering just how essential jumping is for the whole adventure, especially the scroll sections; that plus how cryptic some enemies’ weaknesses can be compared to others which are pretty much clear as day and not being able to use the D-Pad in any way despite Link snapping into the eight set directions , I’m left wondering, more-so than after playing any other remake, how the original holds-up and if maybe it can feel more consistent. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still in love with the visuals, and things like the Telephone Hint Huts and are a godsend for people like me, but I feel like I’ve missed something by not playing the original… or maybe I’m just searching excuses to return to the island.
You have no idea the mental strength I’m putting in to not talk about every single interaction and moment, ‘cause Link’s Awakening feels special, like a dream, yes, but also like a pas memory, memories of spending summers at the beach and waling along hills, memories of thinking of adventure and meeting strange yet lovable folks, scattered memories from a distant past or even a completely different Goomba-infested reality, memories of songs so far away they are beginning to echo…
I feel like I’ve been missing something incredible by not playing this sooner, yet I’m happy to have finally clicked with one of Link’s adventures, and especially this one. It’s fun, it’s carefree, it’s exciting… and beautiful in its own particular, amazing way, to be honest…
…and then, it’ll become real.
A Link to the Past starts on a stormy night...
I actually never have beaten any 2D Zelda games until now, for reasons that are a story for another time, but I have played an tried quiet a ton of them, some until the half-way point or even a bit after that, and the one thing they all share in common is how well they sell this larger than life epic, an adventure with its silly moments, but that it still feels consistently ‘’grand’’, and the menace of evil looming over the heads of everyone in Hyrule. This isn’t a complain, not in the slightest, and that isn’t the reasons I didn’t see any of those games to the finale, is just a part of their identity, like the dungeons, vast worlds opened by upgrades, and Octorocks…
Link’s Awakening begins on the quiet coast…
…But Koholint Island felt different. It still has the many dungeons with their bosses —some being not that great to be honest, at best they end too soon and at worst they are slow or overly simple—, it still has the usual items and upgrades, it has a TON of Octorocks ; in many ways, it still has the mark of 2D Zelda…only instead of feeling like an epic , at times it feels closer to a fairy tale.
Mist forest filled with secret passages and tricker raccoons, songs of fishes and frogs that give new life to what has been gone for a really long time, and what’s perhaps one of the funniest side quests in any game that’s essentially just an item-trade hunt, but it goes on and on across the entire island and your final reward is basically getting two items and scammed, it’s amazing!
There’s a joy to be found in the island, be it the in the little chats with the weird folk or the great search for the color dungeon; even when you aren’t at one of the incredible dungeons, which from a design perspective are the most fun I’ve had with 2D Zelda ever, I never felt like I was losing time or getting side-tracked. The little things like walking a Chomp-Chomp around and playing a crane machine feel just as important as getting the fabled legendary instruments, so mundane but at the same time so mysterious, so fun, so dream-like.
The diorama comparison was also completely on purpose, the toy-like feeling the remake offers is nothing short of amazing, everything feels made out of plastic and clay in such a purposeful way I got nothing but praise for it, and playing through this world reminded me of the tales I made while playing with my tales, distant memories flourishing amidst a world full of wonder and shells.
It sucks that it comes to a price; the game’s frames tank… a LOT, sometimes in the dungeons, but mostly out in the open, and it’s pretty noticeable. I understand that running a completely ‘’open’’ island with such wonderful visuals would have its consequences on performance but I would lie if I said it sometimes felt a lit too much, and I’m left wondering if maybe a bit more time in the oven or a patch or two would have helped things, ‘cause as it is it can feel jarring and take you out of the dream.
It's honestly a bit of a weird remake at times; the fact the jump item isn’t immediately binded to a button permanently boggles my mind considering just how essential jumping is for the whole adventure, especially the scroll sections; that plus how cryptic some enemies’ weaknesses can be compared to others which are pretty much clear as day and not being able to use the D-Pad in any way despite Link snapping into the eight set directions , I’m left wondering, more-so than after playing any other remake, how the original holds-up and if maybe it can feel more consistent. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still in love with the visuals, and things like the Telephone Hint Huts and are a godsend for people like me, but I feel like I’ve missed something by not playing the original… or maybe I’m just searching excuses to return to the island.
You have no idea the mental strength I’m putting in to not talk about every single interaction and moment, ‘cause Link’s Awakening feels special, like a dream, yes, but also like a pas memory, memories of spending summers at the beach and waling along hills, memories of thinking of adventure and meeting strange yet lovable folks, scattered memories from a distant past or even a completely different Goomba-infested reality, memories of songs so far away they are beginning to echo…
I feel like I’ve been missing something incredible by not playing this sooner, yet I’m happy to have finally clicked with one of Link’s adventures, and especially this one. It’s fun, it’s carefree, it’s exciting… and beautiful in its own particular, amazing way, to be honest…
…and then, it’ll become real.
2012
If I were to take FEZ at face value, then my thoughts would be pretty brief: it’s a damn good puzzle-platformer game with a hella strong core, taking a 2D interconnected world and twisting it and turning it to achieve greater heights. It’s never particularly difficult or challenging, but it’s fun; reaching new areas is intriguing, and getting the cubes is ultra satisfying, and in a way, I’m kinda glad it never tries to have really hard sections or some sort of final challenge, because even tho I’m sure that’d be cool, and I would really love to see this dimension-shifting mechanic taken up a notch, I also think the way that it is makes the world feel much more organic than it otherwise would, and sells the idea that this is an experience more about the act of exploring than traversing perilous sections.
However, taking FEZ at face value is impossible, or at least it is for me. FEZ is the jumps and beautiful sounds and sights of its adorable ruined worlds as much as it is the secrets that lie within.
I have talked about my fascination with the ancient world and the mysticism and desire to learn that comes with simply witnessing it, whether it is the remnants of a bygone civilization or the remains of an animal that walked the earth hundreds of millions of nights ago. FEZ has a ton of the former and not much of the latter, but what it shares with both of those is that feeling.
The feeling of stumbling upon something you shouldn’t even be able to understand, of seeing the carvings in the wall and the very code that holds reality together and finding answers behind it—it’s satisfying to beat a platforming challenge and get to a chest with a key in it, but it’s equally, if not even more fulfilling, to fit pieces of the puzzle hidden yet in plain sight.
Spirals of purple marble endlessly repeating, secrets to be revealed by feathered friends or written outside of the game itself, tongues that can be completely translated, and moments like what happened to me where I solved a puzzle by complete chance by just fucking around moving some blocks; connecting the deepest secrets of the world through the addition of the Anti-Cubes alone was an amazing decision. Even after pulling apart layers on top of layers to get some of them, I still feel I’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s in here, what can be found, like an excavation that just has begun.
Every step is a new discovery, and making it to each of the main hub worlds opens a new horizon, from the oldest depths to the stormiest peaks, and it’s all so… tranquil. The wonderful, beautiful pixel art mixed with the outstanding OST, it compels you to keep going, to see juuuuuuuuuuuuuuuust a lil’ more, to keep going a bit further, only to be met with a teleporter, going back to the hub, and repeating that process over and over again. It says a lot when, in the year 2024, a game that uses QR codes or 4th wall breaks to solve puzzles doesn’t make me groan; on the contrary, in fact, it manages to fit into that secret uncovering process tremendously well.
There are pieces that don’t quite fit: the fact that quite a few of those more hidden puzzles end up being a combination of LT and LR inputs is a bit disappointing and misses the mark on what other Anit-Cube quests accomplish so well, and there’s some even weirder stuff like annoying void squares that appear randomly and aren’t anything more than a dumb annoyance or how entering doors may just crash to desktop randomly, which isn’t part of the experience, mind you, and it takes you completely out of it sometimes. It only happened once to me, but this being a problem present years later is a bit disappointing, to be honest.
It's a cube quest that a few times can be a little disappointing or frustrating, but that’s something I can easily look past when the rest of it is so stellar that the act of opening doors is the most exciting fucking thing ever. It invites to wonder and imagine, and there’s so much to be solved and found that, after hitting credits, I feel like the exploration can go even further… Oh, and also, Gomez’s design and name is the best fucking thing ever and there’s no contest, the most basic-ass lil white dude and I love it, look at his smile!
Adventure is out there, and it carries mysteries with it, it’s about time someone solves them.
However, taking FEZ at face value is impossible, or at least it is for me. FEZ is the jumps and beautiful sounds and sights of its adorable ruined worlds as much as it is the secrets that lie within.
I have talked about my fascination with the ancient world and the mysticism and desire to learn that comes with simply witnessing it, whether it is the remnants of a bygone civilization or the remains of an animal that walked the earth hundreds of millions of nights ago. FEZ has a ton of the former and not much of the latter, but what it shares with both of those is that feeling.
The feeling of stumbling upon something you shouldn’t even be able to understand, of seeing the carvings in the wall and the very code that holds reality together and finding answers behind it—it’s satisfying to beat a platforming challenge and get to a chest with a key in it, but it’s equally, if not even more fulfilling, to fit pieces of the puzzle hidden yet in plain sight.
Spirals of purple marble endlessly repeating, secrets to be revealed by feathered friends or written outside of the game itself, tongues that can be completely translated, and moments like what happened to me where I solved a puzzle by complete chance by just fucking around moving some blocks; connecting the deepest secrets of the world through the addition of the Anti-Cubes alone was an amazing decision. Even after pulling apart layers on top of layers to get some of them, I still feel I’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s in here, what can be found, like an excavation that just has begun.
Every step is a new discovery, and making it to each of the main hub worlds opens a new horizon, from the oldest depths to the stormiest peaks, and it’s all so… tranquil. The wonderful, beautiful pixel art mixed with the outstanding OST, it compels you to keep going, to see juuuuuuuuuuuuuuuust a lil’ more, to keep going a bit further, only to be met with a teleporter, going back to the hub, and repeating that process over and over again. It says a lot when, in the year 2024, a game that uses QR codes or 4th wall breaks to solve puzzles doesn’t make me groan; on the contrary, in fact, it manages to fit into that secret uncovering process tremendously well.
There are pieces that don’t quite fit: the fact that quite a few of those more hidden puzzles end up being a combination of LT and LR inputs is a bit disappointing and misses the mark on what other Anit-Cube quests accomplish so well, and there’s some even weirder stuff like annoying void squares that appear randomly and aren’t anything more than a dumb annoyance or how entering doors may just crash to desktop randomly, which isn’t part of the experience, mind you, and it takes you completely out of it sometimes. It only happened once to me, but this being a problem present years later is a bit disappointing, to be honest.
It's a cube quest that a few times can be a little disappointing or frustrating, but that’s something I can easily look past when the rest of it is so stellar that the act of opening doors is the most exciting fucking thing ever. It invites to wonder and imagine, and there’s so much to be solved and found that, after hitting credits, I feel like the exploration can go even further… Oh, and also, Gomez’s design and name is the best fucking thing ever and there’s no contest, the most basic-ass lil white dude and I love it, look at his smile!
Adventure is out there, and it carries mysteries with it, it’s about time someone solves them.
2010
Shout out to small rural towns overtaken by an evil or dark presence that corrupts them or brings hellish creatures. Gotta be one of my favorite genders.
Deemon, the incompetent reviewer, started off his write-off with one of his usual jokes, so unfunny that one might wonder if he was doing it on purpose or if he really has such poor comedy taste. He was trying to hide the fact that he really didn’t know where to start; the path to take might seem clear, but like the streets and forest of Bright Falls, it’s more deceiving than it may look at first, like a maze that’s also a downward spiral.
Deemon pondered, searching for a way to salvage the review, desperately trying to find out which step he should take, what words he should use. He sighed. He decided to let the words write themselves, to let out all the thoughts that had formed while the darkness and light of the town surrounded Alan Wake. He surrendered himself to the unknown, one that might be already written after all… Though he knows he had to talk about the music for sure, that selection of bangers had to be celebrated somehow.
Ambition almost killed Alan Wake, in more ways than one. I mean, I may not know much about Remedy Studios, in fact, it is the very first game of theirs I have ever played and beaten, but I do know the story of Bright Falls and how it was initially going to be something else, an open world of sorts, something that didn’t quite work, as it seems. Translating an already crafted open world into a linear style of game is such a monumental task that if I were in that predicament, I’d have considered outright scrapping everything and starting from zero, but that probably wasn’t even a realistic option for the team to begin with.
But that’s not even what I’m specifically referring to. Alan Wake, the game, the package, the copy made out of code and specific sections, is riddled with hiccups and bumps; it’s filled with padding, sections of trees and mist than don’t offer much aside from one or two manuscripts pages and combat sections that can feel overbearing at times, the remnants of its troubled production remain in aspects such as the barren areas and driving sections that don’t have much of a place and are so frustrating to playthrough even if you ignore any cars I just wish they were taken out —tho it’s kind of cute how it also uses the same light mechanic as the rest of the game—, the encounters with the Taken or the groups of mad crows often lack imagination and enemy variety or don’t jam very well with how the camera works in the case of the camera, and at one point I just kept thinking how much the experience would have benefited if some sections were repurposed in different ways or outright removed.
The imperfections of Alan Wake mostly come from this, factors outside of the game itself, of its story, but they still impact it negatively; I can’t scratch off the feeling of something being lost a bit when all of the boss enemies behave the exact same, the only thing that changes being the creepy lines they spat out and the character model. If the game wasn’t anything more than a series of levels where you shoot at things, then these issues would have rotted its pages…
…luckily, it has a dragon.
Wouldn’t it be funny if I started to praise the actual combat itself after spending two paragraphs criticizing some gameplay sections? Yeah, it would be hilarious! ... ANYWAYyeah I fucking adore the way Al controls. It occupies that same space as Simon from Castlevania, where how slow and imprecise it feels actually benefits the gameplay. You truly get the feeling Alan has never picked a gun in his life in any major capacity; he’s slow, clunky, imprecise, and I wouldn’t want it any other way. The tense dance of using light to weaken the Taken and gen emptying the chambers of them, or hell, simply using a flare and trying to activate the closest generator, it’s a super straight-forward system, and I love it. It’s incredibly satisfying to come out of encounters on top, because even if there isn’t much scarcity in resources (even if you start off each chapter with nothing each time), they are still somewhat limited, especially the most powerful weapons, and little things like mashing X to reload faster or the camera panning out to warn you of nearby enemies are things I didn’t know I needed until now.
It would be a far cry to call it a survival horror, but it’s tense; it’s tense to try to manage the purge while a bulldozer is charging full speed at you; it’s tense to try to outspeed a force you cannot do nothing against; and Alan gets progressively more and more tired. I can make the argument that there should be less of it or at least more variety in what it offers enemy-wise, but nothing will take away from the fact that the core itself is some fantastic shit.
Like… there’s something about fighting against waves of enemies on stage while the sickest rock tune ever plays in the background and the lights and flames fill your eyes that I can only call ‘’fucking awesome’’.
Deemon knew that wasn’t just it. He could talk about flaws and shooting Taken all he wanted, but something else lied within the light. He ran into it.
‘’But there’s something else’’, he said
But there’s something else.
A story already written, touched by the darkness. Written already as a part of it before birth, its muse trying to corrupt it. An ending yet to be typed out.
I have never seen a videogame story that trusts so much that the player will be intrigued enough by it to stick with it and engage with it all the way through. The tale Alan Wake, Alice, Barry, Sarah, and the whole town get tangled into is not intriguing; it is fascinating. I have never felt such closure from getting answers to questions I never realized where there in the first place. From being pretty disappointed about how Nightingale and Mott had such a poor presence as antagonists to being in awe of how their actions fell into place after the truth of this unfortunate series of events was revealed. Alan Wake offers a hell of a mystery. Alan Wake solves it.
The pages of the manuscript are as essential as the cinematics and interactions, so many pieces of the puzzle fit, it’s almost like getting spoiled before something happens, which in a way is exactly what’s happening. At first, I felt pretty disappointed that this would be a jarring light vs darkness story mixed with a thriller. Then it ended up being a meta-narrative within its own meta-narrative. The fact they did that without it feeling overcomplicated or screwing it up is ovation worthy.
But I also feel a huge sense of admiration for the micro-stories at play; hearing and talking to the inhabitants of Bright Falls, listening to Maine’s night radio, the echoes of the Taken and stellar ambience sounds ringing through my ears, the fucking incredible Night Springs shorts that had me HOOKED... It was the little things scattered in the trees and buildings and the small talk that gave this spiraling world even more meaning.
It ends with the darkness hungry for more, just like me. I’ve seen people call Alan Wake ‘’the most 6/7 out of ten game I’ve ever played’’, and even though I do not sympathize with that statement at all because it feels reductive in any context, I kind of get what people mean by it. Alan Wake is profoundly flawed, but most of them do not come from the game itself, but rather from the complicated production it had to go through. In the face of such adversity, I’ve never seen such confidence, such talent, or such a desire to tell a tale like this. Alan Wake isn’t just *a* story, there’s more to be written and read, but at the end of the day, it’s also its own story. And what a story it is.
Maybe this isn’t what the champion of light could have been if the circumstances were different, but the hardships cannot be avoided, and even after going through them, they really sold me on this novel.
Deemon, the incompetent reviewer, started off his write-off with one of his usual jokes, so unfunny that one might wonder if he was doing it on purpose or if he really has such poor comedy taste. He was trying to hide the fact that he really didn’t know where to start; the path to take might seem clear, but like the streets and forest of Bright Falls, it’s more deceiving than it may look at first, like a maze that’s also a downward spiral.
Deemon pondered, searching for a way to salvage the review, desperately trying to find out which step he should take, what words he should use. He sighed. He decided to let the words write themselves, to let out all the thoughts that had formed while the darkness and light of the town surrounded Alan Wake. He surrendered himself to the unknown, one that might be already written after all… Though he knows he had to talk about the music for sure, that selection of bangers had to be celebrated somehow.
Ambition almost killed Alan Wake, in more ways than one. I mean, I may not know much about Remedy Studios, in fact, it is the very first game of theirs I have ever played and beaten, but I do know the story of Bright Falls and how it was initially going to be something else, an open world of sorts, something that didn’t quite work, as it seems. Translating an already crafted open world into a linear style of game is such a monumental task that if I were in that predicament, I’d have considered outright scrapping everything and starting from zero, but that probably wasn’t even a realistic option for the team to begin with.
But that’s not even what I’m specifically referring to. Alan Wake, the game, the package, the copy made out of code and specific sections, is riddled with hiccups and bumps; it’s filled with padding, sections of trees and mist than don’t offer much aside from one or two manuscripts pages and combat sections that can feel overbearing at times, the remnants of its troubled production remain in aspects such as the barren areas and driving sections that don’t have much of a place and are so frustrating to playthrough even if you ignore any cars I just wish they were taken out —tho it’s kind of cute how it also uses the same light mechanic as the rest of the game—, the encounters with the Taken or the groups of mad crows often lack imagination and enemy variety or don’t jam very well with how the camera works in the case of the camera, and at one point I just kept thinking how much the experience would have benefited if some sections were repurposed in different ways or outright removed.
The imperfections of Alan Wake mostly come from this, factors outside of the game itself, of its story, but they still impact it negatively; I can’t scratch off the feeling of something being lost a bit when all of the boss enemies behave the exact same, the only thing that changes being the creepy lines they spat out and the character model. If the game wasn’t anything more than a series of levels where you shoot at things, then these issues would have rotted its pages…
…luckily, it has a dragon.
Wouldn’t it be funny if I started to praise the actual combat itself after spending two paragraphs criticizing some gameplay sections? Yeah, it would be hilarious! ... ANYWAYyeah I fucking adore the way Al controls. It occupies that same space as Simon from Castlevania, where how slow and imprecise it feels actually benefits the gameplay. You truly get the feeling Alan has never picked a gun in his life in any major capacity; he’s slow, clunky, imprecise, and I wouldn’t want it any other way. The tense dance of using light to weaken the Taken and gen emptying the chambers of them, or hell, simply using a flare and trying to activate the closest generator, it’s a super straight-forward system, and I love it. It’s incredibly satisfying to come out of encounters on top, because even if there isn’t much scarcity in resources (even if you start off each chapter with nothing each time), they are still somewhat limited, especially the most powerful weapons, and little things like mashing X to reload faster or the camera panning out to warn you of nearby enemies are things I didn’t know I needed until now.
It would be a far cry to call it a survival horror, but it’s tense; it’s tense to try to manage the purge while a bulldozer is charging full speed at you; it’s tense to try to outspeed a force you cannot do nothing against; and Alan gets progressively more and more tired. I can make the argument that there should be less of it or at least more variety in what it offers enemy-wise, but nothing will take away from the fact that the core itself is some fantastic shit.
Like… there’s something about fighting against waves of enemies on stage while the sickest rock tune ever plays in the background and the lights and flames fill your eyes that I can only call ‘’fucking awesome’’.
Deemon knew that wasn’t just it. He could talk about flaws and shooting Taken all he wanted, but something else lied within the light. He ran into it.
‘’But there’s something else’’, he said
But there’s something else.
A story already written, touched by the darkness. Written already as a part of it before birth, its muse trying to corrupt it. An ending yet to be typed out.
I have never seen a videogame story that trusts so much that the player will be intrigued enough by it to stick with it and engage with it all the way through. The tale Alan Wake, Alice, Barry, Sarah, and the whole town get tangled into is not intriguing; it is fascinating. I have never felt such closure from getting answers to questions I never realized where there in the first place. From being pretty disappointed about how Nightingale and Mott had such a poor presence as antagonists to being in awe of how their actions fell into place after the truth of this unfortunate series of events was revealed. Alan Wake offers a hell of a mystery. Alan Wake solves it.
The pages of the manuscript are as essential as the cinematics and interactions, so many pieces of the puzzle fit, it’s almost like getting spoiled before something happens, which in a way is exactly what’s happening. At first, I felt pretty disappointed that this would be a jarring light vs darkness story mixed with a thriller. Then it ended up being a meta-narrative within its own meta-narrative. The fact they did that without it feeling overcomplicated or screwing it up is ovation worthy.
But I also feel a huge sense of admiration for the micro-stories at play; hearing and talking to the inhabitants of Bright Falls, listening to Maine’s night radio, the echoes of the Taken and stellar ambience sounds ringing through my ears, the fucking incredible Night Springs shorts that had me HOOKED... It was the little things scattered in the trees and buildings and the small talk that gave this spiraling world even more meaning.
It ends with the darkness hungry for more, just like me. I’ve seen people call Alan Wake ‘’the most 6/7 out of ten game I’ve ever played’’, and even though I do not sympathize with that statement at all because it feels reductive in any context, I kind of get what people mean by it. Alan Wake is profoundly flawed, but most of them do not come from the game itself, but rather from the complicated production it had to go through. In the face of such adversity, I’ve never seen such confidence, such talent, or such a desire to tell a tale like this. Alan Wake isn’t just *a* story, there’s more to be written and read, but at the end of the day, it’s also its own story. And what a story it is.
Maybe this isn’t what the champion of light could have been if the circumstances were different, but the hardships cannot be avoided, and even after going through them, they really sold me on this novel.
-''I'm a bit nervous''
-''Me too!''
They say as their killer smiles aren't even fazed. That's the kind of attitude I aspire to have when setting off dangerous explosives.
Frog Detective 1 is the perfect example of that breed of videogames I like to refer as ''candy games''; shorter and more laid-back experiences more focused on the adventure of meeting people, doing silly stuff and the interactions that come from it. Or in other, simpler words, lil' goofy treats.
This right here is that entire base idea made into a game. It’s basically just a stroll across this not-so-spooky islands and the interacting with the scientists to solve the most daunting case to ever be, and it’s cute! There are some pretty charming interactions here and there, some funnier than others for sure — Larry and Martin had the best moments by far—, tho overall they felt a bit repetitive at times and at worst some bits felt a bit awkward in a non-intentional way. The style of comedy it goes for isn’t anything new but at its best it really knows how to pull some novel or really funny bits, I just wish some others landed better.
And that’s about it, honestly!!! Aside from dialogue, the other thing you can do is to explore the island and use your magnifying glass for the fun of it, and as much as I love using a fish-eye lens in some of these Muppet looking motherfuckers, it also gets old fast. It’s an idea for more possible visual gags that aren’t explored further, which is how I feel about many other moments in this short mystery. The mouse doesn’t even get to break-dance at the end! What a ripoff!
It's hard for me to get even a bit grumpy about it, and if I started saying that I wished it was more ‘in-depth’ would be straight up silly. It’s a tale about a frog detective, plain and simple, and the enjoyment you’ll get out of it will entirely depend on how much you get charmed by it.
It doesn’t last long, it isn’t much, but it is sweet… just like a piece of candy!
-''Me too!''
They say as their killer smiles aren't even fazed. That's the kind of attitude I aspire to have when setting off dangerous explosives.
Frog Detective 1 is the perfect example of that breed of videogames I like to refer as ''candy games''; shorter and more laid-back experiences more focused on the adventure of meeting people, doing silly stuff and the interactions that come from it. Or in other, simpler words, lil' goofy treats.
This right here is that entire base idea made into a game. It’s basically just a stroll across this not-so-spooky islands and the interacting with the scientists to solve the most daunting case to ever be, and it’s cute! There are some pretty charming interactions here and there, some funnier than others for sure — Larry and Martin had the best moments by far—, tho overall they felt a bit repetitive at times and at worst some bits felt a bit awkward in a non-intentional way. The style of comedy it goes for isn’t anything new but at its best it really knows how to pull some novel or really funny bits, I just wish some others landed better.
And that’s about it, honestly!!! Aside from dialogue, the other thing you can do is to explore the island and use your magnifying glass for the fun of it, and as much as I love using a fish-eye lens in some of these Muppet looking motherfuckers, it also gets old fast. It’s an idea for more possible visual gags that aren’t explored further, which is how I feel about many other moments in this short mystery. The mouse doesn’t even get to break-dance at the end! What a ripoff!
It's hard for me to get even a bit grumpy about it, and if I started saying that I wished it was more ‘in-depth’ would be straight up silly. It’s a tale about a frog detective, plain and simple, and the enjoyment you’ll get out of it will entirely depend on how much you get charmed by it.
It doesn’t last long, it isn’t much, but it is sweet… just like a piece of candy!
2015
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…
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…
2023
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
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
2018
After Fear & Hunger peaked my interest and watching videos and reading stuff about it , starting to play it full of confidence and thinking that I’d know how to play around its trickery a lil’ bit, only for a malformed Guard to cut my arm off and beat me up till I had no health left, waking up right after without either of my legs and bleeding, surrounded by bodies and gore from which I had to claw and crawl my way out off, trying desperately to find an exit and ending up yet another enemy who promptly took away the only health point I had left, and just when I thought I had finally died for real this time, I woke up once again, and was able to witness how said enemy did something I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t even lay on text on here, watched as the world faded away on those last moments of struggle… that was easily one of the most grotesque, vile yet humbling moments a game ever made me feel.
A feeling that is not mere terror and borders true helplessness, a fate brought by chance and my own hubris, the single best and worst fucking way the game could introduce itself. The Gods are too far away to hear your prayers asking for this madness to stop, but maybe that’s a good thing… maybe a worse fate would await you if they were able to hear them.
The dungeons of Fear and Hunger occupy a space that fascinate me, and it’s kinda funny how that’s a statement that serves well for both the context and lore of the game’s world and outside of it; at its more distilled, Fear & Hunger seems something that The Simpsons or Pen & Teller would have made to parody violence in videogames back in the 90s, it’s a collection of every possible vile or grotesque thing mashed together in a festival of cruelty and pain to such an extreme that should by any means be comical. I don’t blame anyone that hasn’t interacted with the game to only see it at that, when a game starts with a content warning such as this and it’s quite literally called Fear & Hunger, it’s easy to assume that this is gonna be some Itchy and Scratchy shit.
If Fear & Hunger was entirely about that, horrid stuff just for the sake of making people point at the screen in disgust or being cruel to ‘cause pain in the player just because, I do not think it would have garnered the following it has all these years later, it wouldn’t have grabbed me like a leech grabs to a host, that’s for sure. It still can seem a bit silly or ‘’too much’’ a few times, like when you encounter an amalgamation of human flesh and minds and it ends up speaking in the foulest yet most casual mouth you can think off, but I honestly could see those moments being done as such completely purpose, as a small acknowledgement of just how exaggerated this setting can feel at first, or maybe they are just a twisted way to have a little bit of a laugh, ‘cause believe me… there ain’t much to smile at otherwise.
The dungeon seems to have something that calls people —in this case something completely opposite to the game itself—, whether is just the impulse to try it out for yourself to wanting to explore every single part of the accursed catacombs, and when I first played the game back in October of last year… I really couldn’t see why. I could see quality, no doubt about it, but with every turn and step, I could almost feel the game physically rejecting me: being mauled by bogs, getting infected after stepping on a fucking nail and dying because of it, having and undesirable encounter with the Cavemother when arriving at the mines, losing a leg or both because I took a plunge I really shouldn’t have, or that series of, let’s just say, catastrophic events I mentioned at the beginning. Every time I loaded the save, every passing moment, every single hurdle I overcame only to always be met with another that felt even major, I always saw the intent behind it, but I never felt the satisfaction of learning it and gaining the knowledge that comes with it, it only felt like I was being kicked down a stair-case that only got deeper and deeper. I ultimately stopped playing, but I was not free of the dungeon, there was something here that, even tho I didn’t quite understand, kept me thinking about it.
And after months, I couldn’t take it anymore, I caved in, I returned to the dungeon of Fear and Hunger, and this time… well, I actually think it’d be better to say this if I use another example:
After what will be a incredibly high and grueling number of deaths and finally overcoming the upper levels of the dungeon with its Guard and flying Gnome infested halls and torture chambers, and unless you find the Thicket on your first go, you’ll most likely pull the lever you’ll encounter in one of the many rooms, which will grant you access to the elevator that will lead you to the next area… the mines. The mines are the break it or make it point for many players, and in my case, they completely broke me; not because of a certain Crow headed enemy which can break your bones and blind you or the ghost enemies you can’t even hit if you don’t have any cursed weapons or magic, those are bad, yes… But they are not the Yellow Mages. Before this point, the ways you could damaged without engaging into combat ranged from being shot with a bow or stepping on a nail, annoying and potentially mortal, but nothing too dangerous if you know what you are doing, the Yellow Mages then take this and the proceed to take it to fucko-levels. Being able to cast a spell in the overworld which, if you are close enough time or take you by surprise, will make you lose an entire limb, get hit 4 times? You lose all of them. No matter what I did, no matter what I tried, because I always arrived to them really hurt or without a companion, I either died on the overworld, or got killed by them while in combat. I felt powerless and defeated, it didn’t simply feel cruel or hard, it felt like it was a fight I didn’t even had a chance of winning ever. That was where I initially stopped playing, that was where my story with the dungeons first ended, and I look back upon it I only think of stress, fear, and frustration, a mixture of feelings I wanted anything but to experience again… who would have thought that I actually never would, even when coming back.
When I finally returned, something had… changed, not with the game itself of course, bit still, it felt different, I still picked Outlander as my starting class since I really like the survival options it gives and the amazing attack stat, I even picked the same options and the introduction since I wanted to start off with something familiar, but even tho it was the exact same, even tho the dungeon was still the same aside of some layout changes that can happen in certain areas every time you start a new run… it felt different. Maybe I went in with a different mind-set, or maybe it was the fact I already had experience from that past playthrough, but despite the fact I was still dying, despite the many errors and mistake I was making and the punishment the game was putting me through just like it did months ago… it all clicked. I was trying far more stuff, the game wasn’t just a puzlle that consisted on either fighter or evading enemies, it felt much more; the world of Fear and Hunger is as integral as the action in the battles, if not more, and gaining knowledge through books, setting traps for enemies, or even just learning how to get enemies’ souls and upgrading yourself with them, little steps that came with pain and challenges, but also with an enormous satisfaction. I’d die and have to repeat all the process over and over again, but each time faster, more efficient, even when something changed, it wasn’t mere trial and error, it was a continuous experimentation that made going from dark rooms to the deepest of chasms daunting yet worth it.
I learnt and discovered strategies to efficiently take care of the guards, how red and explosive vials can be tools for opening paths and locks but also amazing items to get out to sticky situations, I tried and experimented talking to enemies which even when it most cases didn’t led to much, in others meant basically winning the entire battle or getting an item, I even got an ability which turned the bow, a weapon that isn’t actually that great in direct conflict considering is a two-handed weapon, into something hat can one shot practically every single normal enemy outside of battle. Death at the hands of a boss or the Crowmawler never stopped feeling like a looming threat, but this time it was one that could be overcome, thanks to help of allies as well as the items you can get by defeating them, especially the boss souls. But no moment, no boss defeat, no Crowmawler kill, no item requirement felt as exciting and rewarding as going back to the Yellow Mages, saying ‘’fuck it, we ball’’, trying a new plan and it actually working, making them completely unable to cast spells in battle, and after talking to them in battle, getting an item that an help you recruit a character that not only is a strong spellcaster, but also immortal, AND THEN for him to help you through a certain part of a later area, helping you discover a laboratory that gives you a way to progress without sacrificing any party members, but also that holds one of the most powerful spears in the entire game. Fear & Hunger? More like Hopes & Dreams, because we ridin’ alive out of this one!
It's honestly fucking insane, I don’t think I could put it any other way; I really didn’t have to me an active change to the way I interacted with this experience, and yet through its punishing but constant learning curve, the never ending systems that flow into one another and give so much freedom I’m convinced 90 percent of stuff I did could have been accomplished through other means, everything about Fear & Hunger feels so impossible to describe, once you fully engage with it, not because everything in it is completely original or earth-shattering, but because how immense it feels in spite of how small the dungeon is in reality.
You never achieve a point where you are an unstoppable machine, you can be more of less comfortable with your build and party, but the menace of… you know, dying, never stops being there, your fate can always depend on a coin-toss, after all. I think that the best way to say It is that I’m glad the game is the way it is, a world where luck is a prominent factor, where you can never interact with all of it fully and where a single, tiny mistake result in permanent crippling, hell, even tho I overcame the Mages, I also lost a leg to one of them, making it so I couldn’t run for the rest of the run, one last parting reminder of what I managed to win against, but also of how another mistake like that would spell literal disaster. Yet another way for the game to punish me, yet another way to laugh at it when I triumph despite it all, if you could consider any of this ‘’triumph’’.
Fear & Hunger’s sheer madness and punishments wouldn’t be what they are if it wasn’t because of its world, a world I can’t call alive, not because it doesn’t feel like it, but because it reeks of everything foul thing imaginable. Hell, at times you can be the foul thing, I had to attack an entire village ‘cause I made an accident and fucked up! It fucking sucked and I felt so terrible about it to the point of contemplating trying to load a past save? You bet I did! You are told many times that the dungeon is a horrible place, but no words truly do it justice; it gets worse as you delve deeper, and deeper it delves, to the point of questioning what’s the logic behind this walls, if none. Wretched beings brough by desperation or corruption, fauna perverted by the darkness trying to survive, cults that serve different old gods but share the same madness, and a story of fellowships both in the past and present, all searching something in the dungeon, be it someone, something, desire, or godhood. Fear & Hunger doesn’t have much narrative, the one present being defined and individual to each of the characters, but the story behind and in it is so fascinating to learn about and so horrifying to truly understand that gives so much more force to said individual narratives and a killer fantasy setting.
There are so many reasons the dungeon calls to so many, but I think it all comes down to the experience itself, the idea of finding something you shouldn’t, of continuously experimenting and winning thanks to it, of trying to about starvation and madness by all means and only grabbing onto it by the tip of your fingers, and the idea that every run can go differently not so much because of the random items (tho thank All-Mer for the ones that always are on the same place no matter what) but by decisions you take, the path you decide to go down from, the enemies you face or ignore, the friends or enemies you make. When arriving at the city of M'habre, which has to be my favorite section in the whole game, you could theoretically skip all of it if you killed the other playable characters as Knight or used a ton of Empty Scrolls. You can basically skip three whole major boss fights if you really want to. The fact that’s even a possibility shatters my feeble mind more than spamming Black Orb.
If anything, Fear & Hunger biggest problem isn’t something related to the game itself… it’s how fucking broken it is. I swear the code must have been written on a scroll or something, ‘cause the amount of bugs and glitches is… not really immense, but they a constant and some can even break the game completely, getting you stuck in certain sections or one entire area before the final bosses of ending A and B being completely broken, and in one in particular made me receive that Yellow Mage attack constantly, which honestly may seem poetic, but it made me look an entire hour for solutions, and I ended up having to repeat the whole thing while praying it didn’t happen again. If by any chance what I’ve said about the game has caught your eye and want to give it a shot, by any means, do, but please, install one of the many bug fix patched made by fand (some also include censor mods which is also pretty cool), I should have done it and makes things much better, butt he fact the game still has some of these is infuriating. Getting soft locked isn’t the same type of cruel that the rest of the game goes for, it’s just fucking annoying.
The adventure that awaits everyone in Fear & Hunger is always terrifying, it’s always a race against time and insanity, always a test in resource management and decision making… but it’s also always different, maybe sometimes in the smallest of ways, but that makes an impact, nonetheless. The dungeon forces its players are forced to get creative through sheer cruelty, but it makes those moments of glimmering light the more valuable; even when there are no happy endings at the end of the line, most come down to a simple question; will you let the dungeon change you? Or will you be the one to change the dungeon? Fear & Hunger I can’t recommend like others, if you weren’t interested by it or its premise really irks you, then I don’t think most if the things I said will make you change your mind, and that’s totally fine! I just wanted to tell of my experience with it, what I learnt, what it made me feels, and how it’s much more than it seems, and despite the pain it can induce, travelling into the unknown comes with risks, so part of the course…
After getting endings A, B, D and E, I can say that I have learnt something for sure… Gods are REALLY weak to poison, which hey, kinda nice kowing I can stop an eldritch abomination with a lil’ bit of insecticide!
A feeling that is not mere terror and borders true helplessness, a fate brought by chance and my own hubris, the single best and worst fucking way the game could introduce itself. The Gods are too far away to hear your prayers asking for this madness to stop, but maybe that’s a good thing… maybe a worse fate would await you if they were able to hear them.
The dungeons of Fear and Hunger occupy a space that fascinate me, and it’s kinda funny how that’s a statement that serves well for both the context and lore of the game’s world and outside of it; at its more distilled, Fear & Hunger seems something that The Simpsons or Pen & Teller would have made to parody violence in videogames back in the 90s, it’s a collection of every possible vile or grotesque thing mashed together in a festival of cruelty and pain to such an extreme that should by any means be comical. I don’t blame anyone that hasn’t interacted with the game to only see it at that, when a game starts with a content warning such as this and it’s quite literally called Fear & Hunger, it’s easy to assume that this is gonna be some Itchy and Scratchy shit.
If Fear & Hunger was entirely about that, horrid stuff just for the sake of making people point at the screen in disgust or being cruel to ‘cause pain in the player just because, I do not think it would have garnered the following it has all these years later, it wouldn’t have grabbed me like a leech grabs to a host, that’s for sure. It still can seem a bit silly or ‘’too much’’ a few times, like when you encounter an amalgamation of human flesh and minds and it ends up speaking in the foulest yet most casual mouth you can think off, but I honestly could see those moments being done as such completely purpose, as a small acknowledgement of just how exaggerated this setting can feel at first, or maybe they are just a twisted way to have a little bit of a laugh, ‘cause believe me… there ain’t much to smile at otherwise.
The dungeon seems to have something that calls people —in this case something completely opposite to the game itself—, whether is just the impulse to try it out for yourself to wanting to explore every single part of the accursed catacombs, and when I first played the game back in October of last year… I really couldn’t see why. I could see quality, no doubt about it, but with every turn and step, I could almost feel the game physically rejecting me: being mauled by bogs, getting infected after stepping on a fucking nail and dying because of it, having and undesirable encounter with the Cavemother when arriving at the mines, losing a leg or both because I took a plunge I really shouldn’t have, or that series of, let’s just say, catastrophic events I mentioned at the beginning. Every time I loaded the save, every passing moment, every single hurdle I overcame only to always be met with another that felt even major, I always saw the intent behind it, but I never felt the satisfaction of learning it and gaining the knowledge that comes with it, it only felt like I was being kicked down a stair-case that only got deeper and deeper. I ultimately stopped playing, but I was not free of the dungeon, there was something here that, even tho I didn’t quite understand, kept me thinking about it.
And after months, I couldn’t take it anymore, I caved in, I returned to the dungeon of Fear and Hunger, and this time… well, I actually think it’d be better to say this if I use another example:
After what will be a incredibly high and grueling number of deaths and finally overcoming the upper levels of the dungeon with its Guard and flying Gnome infested halls and torture chambers, and unless you find the Thicket on your first go, you’ll most likely pull the lever you’ll encounter in one of the many rooms, which will grant you access to the elevator that will lead you to the next area… the mines. The mines are the break it or make it point for many players, and in my case, they completely broke me; not because of a certain Crow headed enemy which can break your bones and blind you or the ghost enemies you can’t even hit if you don’t have any cursed weapons or magic, those are bad, yes… But they are not the Yellow Mages. Before this point, the ways you could damaged without engaging into combat ranged from being shot with a bow or stepping on a nail, annoying and potentially mortal, but nothing too dangerous if you know what you are doing, the Yellow Mages then take this and the proceed to take it to fucko-levels. Being able to cast a spell in the overworld which, if you are close enough time or take you by surprise, will make you lose an entire limb, get hit 4 times? You lose all of them. No matter what I did, no matter what I tried, because I always arrived to them really hurt or without a companion, I either died on the overworld, or got killed by them while in combat. I felt powerless and defeated, it didn’t simply feel cruel or hard, it felt like it was a fight I didn’t even had a chance of winning ever. That was where I initially stopped playing, that was where my story with the dungeons first ended, and I look back upon it I only think of stress, fear, and frustration, a mixture of feelings I wanted anything but to experience again… who would have thought that I actually never would, even when coming back.
When I finally returned, something had… changed, not with the game itself of course, bit still, it felt different, I still picked Outlander as my starting class since I really like the survival options it gives and the amazing attack stat, I even picked the same options and the introduction since I wanted to start off with something familiar, but even tho it was the exact same, even tho the dungeon was still the same aside of some layout changes that can happen in certain areas every time you start a new run… it felt different. Maybe I went in with a different mind-set, or maybe it was the fact I already had experience from that past playthrough, but despite the fact I was still dying, despite the many errors and mistake I was making and the punishment the game was putting me through just like it did months ago… it all clicked. I was trying far more stuff, the game wasn’t just a puzlle that consisted on either fighter or evading enemies, it felt much more; the world of Fear and Hunger is as integral as the action in the battles, if not more, and gaining knowledge through books, setting traps for enemies, or even just learning how to get enemies’ souls and upgrading yourself with them, little steps that came with pain and challenges, but also with an enormous satisfaction. I’d die and have to repeat all the process over and over again, but each time faster, more efficient, even when something changed, it wasn’t mere trial and error, it was a continuous experimentation that made going from dark rooms to the deepest of chasms daunting yet worth it.
I learnt and discovered strategies to efficiently take care of the guards, how red and explosive vials can be tools for opening paths and locks but also amazing items to get out to sticky situations, I tried and experimented talking to enemies which even when it most cases didn’t led to much, in others meant basically winning the entire battle or getting an item, I even got an ability which turned the bow, a weapon that isn’t actually that great in direct conflict considering is a two-handed weapon, into something hat can one shot practically every single normal enemy outside of battle. Death at the hands of a boss or the Crowmawler never stopped feeling like a looming threat, but this time it was one that could be overcome, thanks to help of allies as well as the items you can get by defeating them, especially the boss souls. But no moment, no boss defeat, no Crowmawler kill, no item requirement felt as exciting and rewarding as going back to the Yellow Mages, saying ‘’fuck it, we ball’’, trying a new plan and it actually working, making them completely unable to cast spells in battle, and after talking to them in battle, getting an item that an help you recruit a character that not only is a strong spellcaster, but also immortal, AND THEN for him to help you through a certain part of a later area, helping you discover a laboratory that gives you a way to progress without sacrificing any party members, but also that holds one of the most powerful spears in the entire game. Fear & Hunger? More like Hopes & Dreams, because we ridin’ alive out of this one!
It's honestly fucking insane, I don’t think I could put it any other way; I really didn’t have to me an active change to the way I interacted with this experience, and yet through its punishing but constant learning curve, the never ending systems that flow into one another and give so much freedom I’m convinced 90 percent of stuff I did could have been accomplished through other means, everything about Fear & Hunger feels so impossible to describe, once you fully engage with it, not because everything in it is completely original or earth-shattering, but because how immense it feels in spite of how small the dungeon is in reality.
You never achieve a point where you are an unstoppable machine, you can be more of less comfortable with your build and party, but the menace of… you know, dying, never stops being there, your fate can always depend on a coin-toss, after all. I think that the best way to say It is that I’m glad the game is the way it is, a world where luck is a prominent factor, where you can never interact with all of it fully and where a single, tiny mistake result in permanent crippling, hell, even tho I overcame the Mages, I also lost a leg to one of them, making it so I couldn’t run for the rest of the run, one last parting reminder of what I managed to win against, but also of how another mistake like that would spell literal disaster. Yet another way for the game to punish me, yet another way to laugh at it when I triumph despite it all, if you could consider any of this ‘’triumph’’.
Fear & Hunger’s sheer madness and punishments wouldn’t be what they are if it wasn’t because of its world, a world I can’t call alive, not because it doesn’t feel like it, but because it reeks of everything foul thing imaginable. Hell, at times you can be the foul thing, I had to attack an entire village ‘cause I made an accident and fucked up! It fucking sucked and I felt so terrible about it to the point of contemplating trying to load a past save? You bet I did! You are told many times that the dungeon is a horrible place, but no words truly do it justice; it gets worse as you delve deeper, and deeper it delves, to the point of questioning what’s the logic behind this walls, if none. Wretched beings brough by desperation or corruption, fauna perverted by the darkness trying to survive, cults that serve different old gods but share the same madness, and a story of fellowships both in the past and present, all searching something in the dungeon, be it someone, something, desire, or godhood. Fear & Hunger doesn’t have much narrative, the one present being defined and individual to each of the characters, but the story behind and in it is so fascinating to learn about and so horrifying to truly understand that gives so much more force to said individual narratives and a killer fantasy setting.
There are so many reasons the dungeon calls to so many, but I think it all comes down to the experience itself, the idea of finding something you shouldn’t, of continuously experimenting and winning thanks to it, of trying to about starvation and madness by all means and only grabbing onto it by the tip of your fingers, and the idea that every run can go differently not so much because of the random items (tho thank All-Mer for the ones that always are on the same place no matter what) but by decisions you take, the path you decide to go down from, the enemies you face or ignore, the friends or enemies you make. When arriving at the city of M'habre, which has to be my favorite section in the whole game, you could theoretically skip all of it if you killed the other playable characters as Knight or used a ton of Empty Scrolls. You can basically skip three whole major boss fights if you really want to. The fact that’s even a possibility shatters my feeble mind more than spamming Black Orb.
If anything, Fear & Hunger biggest problem isn’t something related to the game itself… it’s how fucking broken it is. I swear the code must have been written on a scroll or something, ‘cause the amount of bugs and glitches is… not really immense, but they a constant and some can even break the game completely, getting you stuck in certain sections or one entire area before the final bosses of ending A and B being completely broken, and in one in particular made me receive that Yellow Mage attack constantly, which honestly may seem poetic, but it made me look an entire hour for solutions, and I ended up having to repeat the whole thing while praying it didn’t happen again. If by any chance what I’ve said about the game has caught your eye and want to give it a shot, by any means, do, but please, install one of the many bug fix patched made by fand (some also include censor mods which is also pretty cool), I should have done it and makes things much better, butt he fact the game still has some of these is infuriating. Getting soft locked isn’t the same type of cruel that the rest of the game goes for, it’s just fucking annoying.
The adventure that awaits everyone in Fear & Hunger is always terrifying, it’s always a race against time and insanity, always a test in resource management and decision making… but it’s also always different, maybe sometimes in the smallest of ways, but that makes an impact, nonetheless. The dungeon forces its players are forced to get creative through sheer cruelty, but it makes those moments of glimmering light the more valuable; even when there are no happy endings at the end of the line, most come down to a simple question; will you let the dungeon change you? Or will you be the one to change the dungeon? Fear & Hunger I can’t recommend like others, if you weren’t interested by it or its premise really irks you, then I don’t think most if the things I said will make you change your mind, and that’s totally fine! I just wanted to tell of my experience with it, what I learnt, what it made me feels, and how it’s much more than it seems, and despite the pain it can induce, travelling into the unknown comes with risks, so part of the course…
After getting endings A, B, D and E, I can say that I have learnt something for sure… Gods are REALLY weak to poison, which hey, kinda nice kowing I can stop an eldritch abomination with a lil’ bit of insecticide!
They did it… I can’t believe it… they really did it! They gave a backstory to the greatest character in the whole game!
THE ROOMBA!!
Playing this just after beating and trying out what Seal the Deal had to offer gives the biggest whiplash imaginable, and not just because the reasons you may be thinking of; yes, opinions on Seal the Deal are widly mixed and Nyakuza Metro seems to be regarded as amazing pretty consistently, but those matters are still subjective all things considered, and I won’t ignore the many fans the former DLC has.
No, what I mean is that after playing such an expansion so focused on fixed objectives and more concised tasks, jumping onto the trains of Nyakuza Metro is like playing a completely different game, and a pretty rad one at that.
Alpine Peaks had already experimented with the idea of Free Roam, and if you read my review on the original game, you’ll know that I really, really love that area A TON, so one of the DLCs exploring that idea again was pretty exciting, but even tho both chapters are open in nature, the metro couldn’t be more different, and I mean that in every sense of the world.
These cat-infested tunnels feel… alive, moreso than any of the previous chapters ever did. Both chapters 1 and 4 introduced more open areas with defined sections you could access at any moment or order, but neither the world itself nor the characters and enemies that inhabit could escape that feeling of ‘’playground’’, of existing simply for you to have cool stuff to jump and dive over. Admittedly, Alpine Peaks (my beloved) came the closes to breaking this with its amazing sense of scale and design, but it still felt a bit gamified, like this was still a place that existed first and foremost to have platforming challenges, which is the objective of any platformer don’t get me wrong, but I didn’t fully succeed in making you forget that, which seemed to be what it was going for.
Nyakuza Metro doesn’t fail, and in fact, it goes above and beyond everything I could have ever expected. The neon lights of the underground are striking from the very first moment you arrive, and if it wasn’t made clear by the far more fluent animations of the Empress and her goons, then everything else will make you realize just how insane of an upgrade everything has received. Food stands and restaurants and every corner, groups of cats gathering together and having conversations you can overhear through out the chaos and movement, trains carried by the tails of huge cats and light the way with their eyes, vacuum cleaners that mix the bouncing platforms and paint mechanic from previous chapters to amazing results, the many side paths or stops you can take and the huge amount of new cosmetics and badges you can purchase… it gives the the metro a feeling of sense and place, one that allows it to feel like a natural space that is, in all honestly, pretty impressive with how pretty and creative it can get, both with new ideas and previous ones.
It makes you feel like a mouse in a crowded kitchen, somewhere you shouldn’t be, yet you manage to find a path. As you hear cats complaining about the complications of the metro system and how hard is to get around, you find unconventional ways that lead you to unexpected paths, it doesn’t feel like someone planned an obstacle course for you to get through, it feels like you are going against the tides and making progress in probably not-so-legal ways. For a platformer to accomplish this while also giving you actually fun challenges is a monumental task, but here they make it look so easy; I never thought running through railways and jumping over electric flyers could be so fun, and yet, here we are! And even in the moments where it feels more like a usual platforming venture, it never feels that striking visual look and it always does something intelligent of fun with its gameplay, like putting the time-stopping hat to much better use than the base game ever did or sections like the electricity ball gauntlet.
It's honestly impressive how well it’s pulled off, how such a cool idea is realized while almost never losing the fun factor… and its exactly why it saddens me a bit that they didn’t go harder with it or explored areas of its potential it clearly had. The metro is divided into colored sections, each with barriers you can unlock by buying the respective ticket and with its time pieces, which an amazing way to go about it… but the fundamental way the time pieces work clashes with the ‘’you gotta open the metro for yourself!’’ idea. Sure, you may grab the ticket before the second or main time piece and that may make getting to the next a liiittle easier, but usually, but the time you get it… there won’t be much left to do in the area, and that goes for every single section. Sure, you can get the stickers and buy badges, and while is fun to grab those little extras, they are a side thing that don’t really impact thing much, and you’ll need money (and probably also farm it, which you know… not fun) for the badges either way, so opening the metro partially or even completely doesn’t make the actual main objective any more satisfying, and in fact you’ll probably won’t interact with it much, which is a huge bummer, ‘cause if they made you to not teleport every time you get a time piece on this one or at least near the entrance of the color area you are on, it would go a long way into actually using the connected nature of the metro, because how it is right now, it isn’t that far off with how Chapter 4 handled it, which worked really well there… but not so much here.
How things are right now, they would have felt much more justifiable if the story played a bigger role this time, but saldy, we only get snippets. The Empress is one of the coolest chapter ‘’villains’’ in the whole game, and the idea of the nyakuza as a whole is super cool, but sadly, aside of the initial presentation and one unique cinematic halfway, you always get a the same cinematic of the goons taking your piece and the Empress saying a new bit of dialogue, and honestly, considering how every single corner of the metro is filled with detail, even the random posters, the fact they main bads/allies don’t have much to say or do until the last mission is a huge bummer, and it double sucks, ‘cause that final mission is amazing!
It does what Chapter 4 and 6 tried to pulled off, except WAYYY better and WAYYY more enjoyable and fun, having one last run through the metro, dodging everything and everyone after the Empress outs a bounty for you is the coolest finale possible and the best possible built up for the final battle, a final battle that…. Doesn’t exist. Yeah, while I talked negatively about the last mission of Alpine Peak and Artic Cruise, them not having a final boss made complete sense, but this time the fact a final confrontation is also mission is the biggest hungover of the chapter. You could say the whole finale is the final boss, and I can kinda see it as that, but the whole time things seemed to be leading up to a fight that just didn’t happen, and it ultimately makes the very ending of the DLC pretty anticlimactic… tho maybe at that point, I’m just lamenting that this could have been greater than it already is.
Nyakuza Metro is an amazing final DLC, most of its problems residing in things carried over from the base game or just small, missed opportunities here and there, but ultimately, it’s a success, and nothing will take that away. Its time rift is a perfect example of it: it isn’t hard, especially when compared to the one from the last chapter, but its’ creative, it feels natural, it’s fun, just like the rest of the package, and when viewing it alone, it’s an incredible platforming experience, and probably the best chapter in the whole game.
The Nyakuza are so cool, I wish cats were real…
THE ROOMBA!!
Playing this just after beating and trying out what Seal the Deal had to offer gives the biggest whiplash imaginable, and not just because the reasons you may be thinking of; yes, opinions on Seal the Deal are widly mixed and Nyakuza Metro seems to be regarded as amazing pretty consistently, but those matters are still subjective all things considered, and I won’t ignore the many fans the former DLC has.
No, what I mean is that after playing such an expansion so focused on fixed objectives and more concised tasks, jumping onto the trains of Nyakuza Metro is like playing a completely different game, and a pretty rad one at that.
Alpine Peaks had already experimented with the idea of Free Roam, and if you read my review on the original game, you’ll know that I really, really love that area A TON, so one of the DLCs exploring that idea again was pretty exciting, but even tho both chapters are open in nature, the metro couldn’t be more different, and I mean that in every sense of the world.
These cat-infested tunnels feel… alive, moreso than any of the previous chapters ever did. Both chapters 1 and 4 introduced more open areas with defined sections you could access at any moment or order, but neither the world itself nor the characters and enemies that inhabit could escape that feeling of ‘’playground’’, of existing simply for you to have cool stuff to jump and dive over. Admittedly, Alpine Peaks (my beloved) came the closes to breaking this with its amazing sense of scale and design, but it still felt a bit gamified, like this was still a place that existed first and foremost to have platforming challenges, which is the objective of any platformer don’t get me wrong, but I didn’t fully succeed in making you forget that, which seemed to be what it was going for.
Nyakuza Metro doesn’t fail, and in fact, it goes above and beyond everything I could have ever expected. The neon lights of the underground are striking from the very first moment you arrive, and if it wasn’t made clear by the far more fluent animations of the Empress and her goons, then everything else will make you realize just how insane of an upgrade everything has received. Food stands and restaurants and every corner, groups of cats gathering together and having conversations you can overhear through out the chaos and movement, trains carried by the tails of huge cats and light the way with their eyes, vacuum cleaners that mix the bouncing platforms and paint mechanic from previous chapters to amazing results, the many side paths or stops you can take and the huge amount of new cosmetics and badges you can purchase… it gives the the metro a feeling of sense and place, one that allows it to feel like a natural space that is, in all honestly, pretty impressive with how pretty and creative it can get, both with new ideas and previous ones.
It makes you feel like a mouse in a crowded kitchen, somewhere you shouldn’t be, yet you manage to find a path. As you hear cats complaining about the complications of the metro system and how hard is to get around, you find unconventional ways that lead you to unexpected paths, it doesn’t feel like someone planned an obstacle course for you to get through, it feels like you are going against the tides and making progress in probably not-so-legal ways. For a platformer to accomplish this while also giving you actually fun challenges is a monumental task, but here they make it look so easy; I never thought running through railways and jumping over electric flyers could be so fun, and yet, here we are! And even in the moments where it feels more like a usual platforming venture, it never feels that striking visual look and it always does something intelligent of fun with its gameplay, like putting the time-stopping hat to much better use than the base game ever did or sections like the electricity ball gauntlet.
It's honestly impressive how well it’s pulled off, how such a cool idea is realized while almost never losing the fun factor… and its exactly why it saddens me a bit that they didn’t go harder with it or explored areas of its potential it clearly had. The metro is divided into colored sections, each with barriers you can unlock by buying the respective ticket and with its time pieces, which an amazing way to go about it… but the fundamental way the time pieces work clashes with the ‘’you gotta open the metro for yourself!’’ idea. Sure, you may grab the ticket before the second or main time piece and that may make getting to the next a liiittle easier, but usually, but the time you get it… there won’t be much left to do in the area, and that goes for every single section. Sure, you can get the stickers and buy badges, and while is fun to grab those little extras, they are a side thing that don’t really impact thing much, and you’ll need money (and probably also farm it, which you know… not fun) for the badges either way, so opening the metro partially or even completely doesn’t make the actual main objective any more satisfying, and in fact you’ll probably won’t interact with it much, which is a huge bummer, ‘cause if they made you to not teleport every time you get a time piece on this one or at least near the entrance of the color area you are on, it would go a long way into actually using the connected nature of the metro, because how it is right now, it isn’t that far off with how Chapter 4 handled it, which worked really well there… but not so much here.
How things are right now, they would have felt much more justifiable if the story played a bigger role this time, but saldy, we only get snippets. The Empress is one of the coolest chapter ‘’villains’’ in the whole game, and the idea of the nyakuza as a whole is super cool, but sadly, aside of the initial presentation and one unique cinematic halfway, you always get a the same cinematic of the goons taking your piece and the Empress saying a new bit of dialogue, and honestly, considering how every single corner of the metro is filled with detail, even the random posters, the fact they main bads/allies don’t have much to say or do until the last mission is a huge bummer, and it double sucks, ‘cause that final mission is amazing!
It does what Chapter 4 and 6 tried to pulled off, except WAYYY better and WAYYY more enjoyable and fun, having one last run through the metro, dodging everything and everyone after the Empress outs a bounty for you is the coolest finale possible and the best possible built up for the final battle, a final battle that…. Doesn’t exist. Yeah, while I talked negatively about the last mission of Alpine Peak and Artic Cruise, them not having a final boss made complete sense, but this time the fact a final confrontation is also mission is the biggest hungover of the chapter. You could say the whole finale is the final boss, and I can kinda see it as that, but the whole time things seemed to be leading up to a fight that just didn’t happen, and it ultimately makes the very ending of the DLC pretty anticlimactic… tho maybe at that point, I’m just lamenting that this could have been greater than it already is.
Nyakuza Metro is an amazing final DLC, most of its problems residing in things carried over from the base game or just small, missed opportunities here and there, but ultimately, it’s a success, and nothing will take that away. Its time rift is a perfect example of it: it isn’t hard, especially when compared to the one from the last chapter, but its’ creative, it feels natural, it’s fun, just like the rest of the package, and when viewing it alone, it’s an incredible platforming experience, and probably the best chapter in the whole game.
The Nyakuza are so cool, I wish cats were real…
I gotta admit, making an entire DLC to have more of Snatcher and include funny adorable seals is the single best motivator I have ever seen… too bad they forgot to include them in an actually interesting package.
Despite the mixed to negative opinions I had heard, I really wanted to enjoy Seal the Deal, and specially everything that has to do with the newly introduced chapter. Cruises as an idea don’t get explored much in games for how fun they can actually be as a setting; call me a sucker for big-ass boats but what can I say, I do really like the idea of playing through big pools, giant malls, dining rooms and decks all in one place, that and some holiday vibes and you hit jackpot!
Through purely visual lenses, ‘’Artic Cruise’’ does succeed in that department; the vibes here are INMACULATE, nailing what a cruise should be and making it feel actually interconnected and pretty natural all things considered, and of course it’s really fun to see new faces and old friends and foes all together somewhere that isn’t the finale, and there are some funny as all hell interactions, especially with the Conductor and the Alpine Peaks inhabitants, and don’t even get me started with the seals that give the DLC half of its name. They can get a bit annoyingly cute at times, but they have some pretty nice and cute jokes to offer and bounce off Walrus Captain hilariously, I honestly wish he had a more dialogue through coms or at least more presence, ‘cause chatting with that grumpy seadog and seeing him react to his crew’s mess what a highlight of the entire thing.
Part of me wonders if that should have been the main focus of the main chapter, a big open level like Alpine Peaks, more focused on light exploration with some challenges limited to each of the cruise’s areas, or on the contrary, a more linear experience like Chapter 2 where you traverse the ship little by little; I’m not saying those ideas are the only ones that could have been done ore are ‘’definitive’’… but are certainly more focused than whatever we ended up getting.
What we have here are two different versions or what are basically fetch quests, and the other basically a mix of that with the last mission in Chapter 4… I do not like the last mission in chapter 4, and here they even re-used the same music and everything! I don’t think going around doing busy work or picking up stuff three different times was a particularly great idea in the first place, but it’s not like they did anything interesting with it: you just go around, picking up plates, broken shards or seals and bringing them to another place, and the only enjoyment that comes of from is the fun that comes from exploring the ship, one that rapidly fades when you noticed just how annoying it is to go through certain section different times or how the camera can get even more terrible than it did in the standalone game. The last mission is probably the most interesting since it changes things up the most layout wise, but it still doesn’t save it from being a backtracking fest or just simply uninteresting, and it just feels like an sped up finale for what it’s the shortest chapter in the game.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having a chapter with only three missions (five if you count the other two extra time rift challenges, which are the most difficult in the game so far but still a bit underwhelming), but when in the base game you have 6 act chapters where you do something different in each, here having only three where you repeat the same dance in all of them feels… weird, not even lazy or dumb, just… really weird, and despite its brevity, it gets stale REAL quick.
When it comes to the Snatcher side of things, things get marginally better; it’s effectively remixed versions of past acts, and there are A TON of them, and they offer some cool rewards here and there, but it’s still pre-existing content with not that much changed, and unless you are a die hard fun of the game, I can’ imagine most people will get much out of it. Not a bad mode at all, it uses Snatcher in interesting ways and some of the extra challenges I got to play were really fun, but it’s still highly dependent on content that as already there and was already pretty good, but I needed to get a bit crazier or original to be something incredibly remarkable… new songs and the N64 costume are amazing tho.
Seal the Deal feels more like the cut content that didn’t make it into the full release being put out as it was left, which pains me to say ‘cause I don’t wanna ignore the effort that clearly went into it and the fun that can be found in some of its parts, but overall, I just get the sense of a huge missed opportunity, one that can’t get carried by contract making devils or funny lil’ sea mammals…
Despite the mixed to negative opinions I had heard, I really wanted to enjoy Seal the Deal, and specially everything that has to do with the newly introduced chapter. Cruises as an idea don’t get explored much in games for how fun they can actually be as a setting; call me a sucker for big-ass boats but what can I say, I do really like the idea of playing through big pools, giant malls, dining rooms and decks all in one place, that and some holiday vibes and you hit jackpot!
Through purely visual lenses, ‘’Artic Cruise’’ does succeed in that department; the vibes here are INMACULATE, nailing what a cruise should be and making it feel actually interconnected and pretty natural all things considered, and of course it’s really fun to see new faces and old friends and foes all together somewhere that isn’t the finale, and there are some funny as all hell interactions, especially with the Conductor and the Alpine Peaks inhabitants, and don’t even get me started with the seals that give the DLC half of its name. They can get a bit annoyingly cute at times, but they have some pretty nice and cute jokes to offer and bounce off Walrus Captain hilariously, I honestly wish he had a more dialogue through coms or at least more presence, ‘cause chatting with that grumpy seadog and seeing him react to his crew’s mess what a highlight of the entire thing.
Part of me wonders if that should have been the main focus of the main chapter, a big open level like Alpine Peaks, more focused on light exploration with some challenges limited to each of the cruise’s areas, or on the contrary, a more linear experience like Chapter 2 where you traverse the ship little by little; I’m not saying those ideas are the only ones that could have been done ore are ‘’definitive’’… but are certainly more focused than whatever we ended up getting.
What we have here are two different versions or what are basically fetch quests, and the other basically a mix of that with the last mission in Chapter 4… I do not like the last mission in chapter 4, and here they even re-used the same music and everything! I don’t think going around doing busy work or picking up stuff three different times was a particularly great idea in the first place, but it’s not like they did anything interesting with it: you just go around, picking up plates, broken shards or seals and bringing them to another place, and the only enjoyment that comes of from is the fun that comes from exploring the ship, one that rapidly fades when you noticed just how annoying it is to go through certain section different times or how the camera can get even more terrible than it did in the standalone game. The last mission is probably the most interesting since it changes things up the most layout wise, but it still doesn’t save it from being a backtracking fest or just simply uninteresting, and it just feels like an sped up finale for what it’s the shortest chapter in the game.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having a chapter with only three missions (five if you count the other two extra time rift challenges, which are the most difficult in the game so far but still a bit underwhelming), but when in the base game you have 6 act chapters where you do something different in each, here having only three where you repeat the same dance in all of them feels… weird, not even lazy or dumb, just… really weird, and despite its brevity, it gets stale REAL quick.
When it comes to the Snatcher side of things, things get marginally better; it’s effectively remixed versions of past acts, and there are A TON of them, and they offer some cool rewards here and there, but it’s still pre-existing content with not that much changed, and unless you are a die hard fun of the game, I can’ imagine most people will get much out of it. Not a bad mode at all, it uses Snatcher in interesting ways and some of the extra challenges I got to play were really fun, but it’s still highly dependent on content that as already there and was already pretty good, but I needed to get a bit crazier or original to be something incredibly remarkable… new songs and the N64 costume are amazing tho.
Seal the Deal feels more like the cut content that didn’t make it into the full release being put out as it was left, which pains me to say ‘cause I don’t wanna ignore the effort that clearly went into it and the fun that can be found in some of its parts, but overall, I just get the sense of a huge missed opportunity, one that can’t get carried by contract making devils or funny lil’ sea mammals…