A lot of modern metroidvanias I've played, like Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth, focus on combat over traversal and exploration. Pseudoregalia's movement skills are just so fun and interesting to use, and the whole game's designed around it; I love it. The different movement skills work together so well, letting play become more expressive the further the player gets. The level design is great and supports interesting, inventive ways to get around depending on what the player happens to have access to.

I picked up the wall kick first, which is maybe the riskiest and hardest to use of any of them, but I took to it right away and ended up getting to areas my friend didn't think were even possible to reach with just that one ability.

As much as I loved the rest of the game, I did find one particular platforming section in the late game pretty fiddly and uninteresting, and the final boss was merely okay rather than an interesting climax.

I think it's time for me to give up on this one. I've tried it numerous times through the years and even got decently far into it once... but it's just not super compelling to me. For being a 3D game with 2D sprites it just doesn't look that great and all around it feels very... almost but not quite. Besides the OST, which may be my most listened to OST after Chrono Cross. It's like this inbetween of CT and CC (probably because it literally was made between them).

I've heard this was originally a FFVII pitch, and then a possible Chrono Trigger 2 at some point as well, and it does have a lot in common with CT, not just the the soundtrack composer.

Anyway, I think I'm going to abandon this as a game and watch a playthrough instead. Considering how inspired by Gnosticism I am in my own projects it seems like a necessity to at least know the whole plot.

Edit: Just collecting my thoughts here while I watch a play-through, but this very much feels like a game completely led by its narrative and everything about it is in support of that narrative. Basically, there are no overly frivolous gameplay aspects, they're all there for the story. This could very much just have been a novel. Not sure how I feel about that, but it is an interesting way to approach a game.

The pacing is also pretty slow and there's a lot of dialogue to not say so much. That feels like a pretty common Japanese poetic choice. A lot of battle scenes feel like 61 episodes of DBZ.

I thought this was like a run-based game going in and it is but it also isn't? Listen I messed up here I've definitely put this down but it's been a while and I ultimately don't have like much to say. I don't remember anything except that I like the character designs. They don't have a defeat animation which at first I thought was too bad but it does give the whole thing a certain feel, like okay we're done with this match time to move on. That's fun. I like that.

It's a good time-waster that really lives on constantly throwing new gimmicks at you. It's not quite compelling enough that I could see myself trying to like, 'get good' at dicey dungeons you know.

When it comes to run-based games, I'm usually less interested in ones that are too focused on luck and grinding as elements of success. Loop Hero sidesteps this by being essentially a weird hybrid of run-based and idle game, which makes the grinding feel like the point of the game, rather than a thing meant to arbitrarily gate completion from me.

The problem is maybe that it's not a great idle game. As much as the shifting of bottleneck resources is a part of that genre, everything in LH quickly became bottlenecked by a specific resource that can only be obtained via very specific builds, and drops pretty rarely. Still pretty fun, but I'm flagging on chapter 3. Overall, a fantastic gamepass game. Exactly the sort of thing I'm glad I played but also glad I didn't pay for.

Game with a relatable story about going back to your hometown in adulthood and it REALLY sucks, not because anything's changed with the cute old map-shop couple living across the street, or the curry special at the local diner, but because you've had cinder blocks tied to your feet causing you to walk at a glacial pace, and your good old friend Fujita hasn't gotten into conspiracy theories or MLMs, but building space-time exporation devices he insists you to check 'the vibrations out'. He breaks you into a power plant, you meet aliens, and things get worse from there.

The game itself is mainly walking (slowly) around the surprisingly detailed and realistic-feeling town with your shitty car, the fastest bus system in the world, and trains. You can check e-mails to get a sense of who to meet or when, but sometimes these people want to meet you at nighttime and you can only pass time by walking around, or sitting on a couch (for one hour at a time: and up to two hours max.)

The minimal interactions and weirdly detailed spaces with their bespoke toilet rooms and random characters stick around in your mind afterwards. I think that's the game's strong suit - all you can really do is talk to or kill people, but that combined with your relative helplessness in combat make you even wary to walk around a hospital, since some characters will just assault you based on your in-game state.

Well, I didn't stick around for more than 3-4 hours to really see what could happen or pan out beyond a few in-game days, but it's a unique game. There IS technically a goal to do (pursuing the mystery of the game,) but it feels equally valid to just barely follow the plot and wander the huge city and enjoy the wonderfully-modeled spaces. It feels Crypt Underworld-like - the game doesn't really progress the story a lot of times outside of moments you really have to hunt for, so it kinda feels like walking in and out of bizarre, city-life vignettes.

It's really cool to see the LucasArts formula, which I'm mostly familiar with through a Monkey Island context, being applied in a much more serious, storytelling-oriented context. LOOM still has plenty of jokes, but it's also trying to be a more straightforward fantasy story. It's way too short to really pull it off effectively, but it's still fun to see the attempt.

By far the coolest thing about this game is the mode of interaction. It eschews the classic point-and-click "inventory and verb" system for a set of spells that are cast by playing musical notes. Although in a sense this boils down to just a broad set of verbs, it opens the possibility of gaining more verbs throughout the run by being granted them or even deducing them, which feels brilliant. Definitely a game I wish had spawned a bit more of an evolutionary branch, or even just a direct sequel.

This game is four or five brilliant ideas crammed into an ill-fitting Skyrim suit. The pawn-based AI party system is really cool, and the fights that really take advantage of it to have different party members focusing on different tasks are really fun. Climbing on bosses, pulling them off-balance, and focusing different body parts for different effects makes them feel challenging and exciting in a totally different way than action games in the Dark Souls lineage.

The moment-to-moment melee combat is also fascinating. In addition to reactive moves like parries and a dodge attack that gives a bonus if you perfect dodge (prefiguring Final Fantasy XVI), even the basic combo has a rhythm component to it: depending on the tempo of your button presses, you can keep comboing light sword swipes move into a medium finisher, or go for a heavy attack into a longer sequence of damaging strikes.

I discovered all of this within the first few minutes of playing the game, and I was over the moon. If this was the basic combat, imagine what it would look like at an advanced level! But sadly, that didn't pan out. The rhythm components I mentioned above are all there is; there's no complexity to the basic attacks beyond that. And outside of boss fights, the encounter design is entirely structured around throwing tons of mobs at you at once, so all the interesting reactive skills become largely irrelevant and AOEs become the order of the day. By the middle of the game, moving through the overworld became a slog of mob fight after mob fight—unavoidable because you have no direct control over your party—and desperately juggling inventory between the party to avoid overencumbering yourself.

This is the sort of game that was always destined to be a cult classic. It fights with its own goals too much to be a true masterpiece, but its moments of genius are still largely unexploited by the games that have come out since its release. It's left me very excited to see what they do with the sequel.

Low opinion here not because I'm some NEET-phobic conservative but because nameless (and, curiously, genderless) protagonists dating people as a way of 'knowing' grosses me out. There's a lot about how standardized this specific format of short RENPY dategame has become to the point that ends up making games like Milk Outside and Doki Literature Club seem like these astounding subversions outliers to the genre. However to whatever extent that can even said to be true, it would mostly be because short 1 night date Visual Novels are almost at odds with themselves. Why does the nameless protagonist named 'you' go on the date. Why depict this world with intense visual depth but have a faceless dissociated protagonist?

Your protagonist can constantly call her cute, its the only compliment really on their mind, but how dissociated it felt when the girl said 'so are you'. Obviously the idea is that the bland questioning of your character and ease with which they can be positioned as the 'inquirer' is so that its easy for the reader to place themselves into the text, but is this really even working anymore? Haven't we broken away from this bland self insert protagonist as a people like a decade ago?

To illustrate why this problem effects the mechanics, let me take a moment and analyze one of the decisions you make in the game. At one point Kara expresses about how 'fucking based' it is to be a NEET, and you're offered 3 responses:
1. It is?
2. Definitely Based
3. Whats a NEET

The issue is that option 2 and 3 openly contradict each other in terms of the internal knowledge of the player character. Either they know what a NEET is and concur, or they don't know what it is. But the knowledge of one should rule out the other, these options are presupposed based on how aware the player behind the screen wants their player character to be. This means that the player character knowledge is not fixed in place. So either we live in a world where the player character knows what a NEET is but pretends they dont, or they don't know what it is and pretend they do. In either situation the character, if not percieved as a 1 playthrough stand in for the player is being a duplicitous snake. However the innocuous plausible deniability and wish fulfillment doesn't question this contradiction or bring it up. The player unimersed in the experience though sees it right away, and these contradictions in option sections remain for the entirety of the experience.

While there's an obvious criticism to be made about how this flux in player knowledge is immersion breaking, its not the only issue. The other problem is that it limits the scope of player choice to be so obvious that it reduces any impact out of choosing at all. The choice is pretty much made for you on first play based on how much you already know and feel about the topic of NEETism or how much you want to pretend you want to know. There's no fundamental diversion in questioning her in one option or agreeing with her in another, its all in the name of trying to shmooze her at the end of the day. Yet almost all the choices in this game are fundamentally questions based on knowing. Now obviously you can still play with a nameless 'knowledge flux' character like this but their status within dating games should not be so assumed. This is a function that works better for an edutainment game like Tomato Clinic. Or a therapeutic inquiry like with Milk Outside a Bag. But in games based around the idea of dating it registers the experience as canned and phoned in, your player character is a nothing so actually getting more intimate means nothing.

The 'edutainment' consideration is being teased at through a cultural relationship obviously, but does so to an extent that is almost distracting. Trying to mix the aspects of learning with the fiction of intimacy can and often does threaten to undermine the former in advance of the latter. It's very telling that some peoples ideas of the best way of connecting to a cultural frame or reinforcing their own is through doting on and trying to kiss women. Even Don Juan didn't go that far.

A lot of the pace of the game itself and decisions you make feel underwritten. This really feels like a 1st draft that wasn't properly proofread. At some point if you decide to order pizza with Kara, she states that she only prefers grilled chicken on pizza and can't stand pepperoni, indicating that the pizza you would order would have grilled chicken on it. However when it shows up she boldly announces that she went on a whim and tried for half cheese half pepperoni instead. This is far from the only writing goofup, there's one where Kara says you can sit down wherever you'd like and then you just continuing standing there and ask if you can sit down somewhere like 10 minutes later. It's hard to come up with some sort of textual justification for this, I think this is just the result of being underwritten as a lot of this genre tends to be and trying to offer you as many tensions as possible only to relieve them through player choice. It's fine, my character can express autonomy sometimes. I think that it's only a bug to critical readers though, the whole point is to captivate readership of people who wouldn't think twice so how poorly written most of these sort of dating storygames tend to be might be part of the point. These are so easy to make that quality doesn't matter much at all.

The game also registers to me as a little creepy I think. You can demand certain actions out of her like to clean her room or kiss you. And she does turn you down sometimes, but the actual framing itself of the act as an overt demand makes me really uncomfortable. This is another aspect with which it becomes part of a mechanical limitation of the RENPY software itself, you could offer a variety of longer choices where your character would say more things so you can fully follow if its a choice you want to make, but the limitation of the renpy dialogue box popups mean that any choice longer than a sentence would spam the screen with an overwhelming amount of words from which you'd only be able to choose one making such a venture unwieldy. Compare this to Twine, where the options are all filled as text at the bottom of the screen and the distinction is as different as night and day. Renpy Visual Novels I would argue just don't functionally work for the aspects of dating. Not to mention that the initial date is set up by her cousin who 'sees her more as a sister'. I don't know, it's a piece of fiction so I can't think of a more leering and opportunistic starting point for the story.

Finally is the object of the text herself, Kara, a genuinely pathetic E-Girl who seems to be shy but indicates no issues ever speaking to you. An internet otaku and gun nut with some clear indications of autistic neurodivergence. This is all solid stuff for a character study, issues is most of her identity seems to come out of a pride for having a NEET lifestyle (which doesn't even map onto the mild shame most NEETs actually have) and her overt elitism over her own hobbies. She calls working people 'wagies', she obsesses over the distinction between weebs and otaku so she can write off shonen anime only to give basic unprofound plot synopsis of the slice of life stuff she watches. She reminds me of a defanged version of Tomoko from Watamote. Except unlike how anthematic Kara is, Tomoko's story is one of constant struggle. Everything here is almost too smooth. It feels like the fact she doesn't need to even try and learn about you but simply exist in front of you to be getting in the way of her own motivations to learn to date. Being barely presentable to another human is just another hobby, it's not a sign of improvement at all no matter how much she insists to you towards the end is it. Beyond that I find her general elitism and obsessive use of l33tspeak to be ineffective in imbuing charm, authenticity, or a strong connection to the main character.

I also had some pretty severe issues with the lack of openess about the characters gender presentation. There's several obvious clues to the fact Kara is supposed to be trans, the Blajah and shirt in particular being 2 of the largest cultural indicators. But neither the character nor the creator wants to confirm the gender of the character as trans or cis. Which would be fine, except most people are going to just assume the character is a cis woman. It's hard not to explain this in a way that doesn't come off as gatekeeping but Blahaj posting is a largely established trans icon. Recently there's been a lot of cloutchasing ciswomen who take the iconography of trans women and play into them with an included 'transition timeline' joke as well. Kara has her own ambiguous version of this tweeted by the dev. Even assuming the best intent here, that this is a stealth trans character written for the purposes of normalizing trans women. I feel like by writing the story through such a leering mode, and by not having any overt mention of the transness of the character it only further divorces away from the potential awareness and respect cis people would have. Furthermore most trans people have lived a life of tribulation and necessary perseverance, like protrayed by Celeste. So even if the author did reveal the character was trans, it would not be a wholely useful reference point for understanding the trans experience. The fact this is instead the text plays into the reterritorialization of trans interests and subcultures as cis makes me pretty upset, so I thought I should at least do my do diligence in expressing that. The fact of the matter is some people are going to read this and be confounded I'd even call Blahaj such a clear indication of being trans, which shows the degree to which our icon and symbols are already being pillaged from us by people who don't care about us at all.

It's generic RENPY dating trash, but I figured that while the oven is hot I should pick a relatively popular one for expressing my grievances. The mixed to positive reception this game received while remembering how much overt mockery Milk Outside did is starting to piss me off, so I guess I'll just end it here to prevent myself from going on some sort of tirade.

Even if a lot of the morals are pretty obvious within these several fables (basically don’t lie) there’s still something about how it’s all presented. I never knew anything about Miyazawa until having played this, but it’s pretty clear that his style has had a huge impact on Japanese culture. I particularly think of Studio Ghibli but that’s probably just the most famous example.

The stories are mostly pretty simple but they still might make you ponder for other reasons. For example, the story where the rabbit lies about his accomplishments, as maybe we shouldn’t expect some other insecure brute might kill us over it? I mean lying is bad, but shouldn’t we also consider why people will kill over some things that are so frivolous? The story ends up being a bit deeper than I think it intends for that reason. I guess you can never know other peoples’ limits.

Also elephants trample the house of a rich man but the servants are just collateral? It never even mentions them. Also likely unintentional.

Overall I highly recommend it but it certainly isn’t perfect and not even so much a game as something to be experienced. I stop to think if this would have been better represented as a movie or TV show, but no I think the interactivity of the medium of video games feels more intentional. There’s something about exploring an entire town and talking to everyone that immerses you more than simply riding third person behind someone else experiencing these stories. I might say this a lot about art, but it really is something that can be hard to explain.

Tunic prepared me for a lot of things by wearing its influences really, REALLY prominently on its sleeve. The internet helped by preparing me for the kind of fiendish, higher-level puzzles that I associate with like, Fez and shit. What I did not expect was the degree to which they just put Dark Souls in here too. Like the first thing that happens is you find a big closed door and get told to ring two bells on opposite sides of the map to open it. Combat has the same weight. Boss fights are the same ur-DS boss that you circle strafe and block. This taught me a very important thing: that I'm still so fuckin sick of Dark Souls you have no goddamn idea. Holy shit I was so annoyed with every time I had to fight a boss. They aren't too tough it's just the cadence is grating to me.

Luckily, it's not just Dark Souls. It's also a bunch of other games I've already played. Primed for that kind of heavily referenced gameplay, I thought of Zelda 1 specifically. I thought of The Witness. I thought of Hydlide for a bit. The Fez comparison ultimately didn't bare out, and it's not really trying to be that. There's a language here, and I am pretty sure you can figure it out, but I don't care about that. The plot is clearly not intended to be interesting in any way that I care to learn and I got the good ending without needing to intuit a single word. I'm more interested in the text as a recreation of being a child with low/no reading ability, only able to slightly comprehend these simple video game worlds through context. Because that's what it is! Even without being able to read it, the manual clearly lays out the games big secrets for you directly. Tunic is pretending to be a simpler game than it is, kept from you by factors inherent to your outside-the-game existence. That's like the whole entire gimmick.

And god, it works. Manual pages are like, top-tier video game pickup to me. Each one is a little treasure trove of cute art and gameplay tips, and even the occasional little cheat of functionality that makes no sense, like the map pages actually showing your current location. Yeah a hookshot is cool but have you considered: a picture of a little fox doing a roll? I highly recco

So, while Tunic was all very nice and good, I do think it lacks that final oomph of real personality to be truely one of the greats. It's ultimately just a nostalgia piece, trying to recreate a feeling that never quite existed, at least for me. The time before I could read good was certainly not a time where I'd have had the level of patience needed for this. It's a charming puzzle box. I enjoyed the hell out of it while it was in front of me and now it's over and I'm not going to think super hard about it from here. Great gamepass game though I'll say that. Damn I love having a machine that can play real ass games.

So this year I was going to make a conscious effort to work through my backlog. Buy less games, play more etc. That quickly fell apart in the first month however I've done decently at playing them so far and the Odin Sphere remaster Leifthrasir is one of the older PSN purchase I have yet to play . I decided it was a good title to finally finish on my 2024 games played list.

Odin Sphere is the third Vanillaware title I've played at the time of writing. The first was Dragon's Crown, a game I truly hated but perhaps approached wrong expecting a four player Guardian Heroes. The second was 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim which I utterly adored for it's keep you guessing sci-fi story. (First quick review I wrote on Backloggd actually) It's fitting then that Odin Sphere would sit somewhere in the middle between them as a game I like but with a lot of flaws preventing me loving it and hard to actually recommend.

So lets get the positive aspects out in the open first as this game does have a lot of good going for it. Firstly the artwork and animations are pretty stunning. Vanillaware is pretty famous for it's layered 2D art style and animations. The characters and enemies all stand out and the usage of colour and style makes it feel like a painting in motion. To carry on the presentation side of my positive compliments, the whimsical soundtrack is stunning. I especially like the theme song but it's all gorgeous wrapping up Odin Sphere into a great looking and sounding package.

I actually had to double check this was originally a PS2 game because even as a remaster it just doesn't feel like it. Equally it just doesn't play like it came from that console. The combat animations and battles are all so smooth chaining from moves to move. This isn't an insult to the PS2, it was an amazing system, just a compliment to Odin sphere's visuals and animations. When in combat the characters have a large amount of moves with more unlocking as the game progresses. It allows you to chain various moves and skills into large combos. Hitting a group of enemies into a huge combo with perfect blocks to keep the chain is initially really fun. I'm saying initially because this is where my praise of Odin sphere starts to breakdown a bit unfortunately. The game is based around five characters:

- Gwyndolin, a Valkyrie Princess.
- Cornelius, a prince cursed into a beast form.
- Mercedes, a fairy Princess.
- Oswald, an orphaned knight with a cursed sword.
- Velvet, a forest Witch.

Similar to Vanillaware's later title 13 Sentinels each character has their own story arc playing the game from different perspectives before a final chapter linking the full story together. In principal the idea is great. Vanillaware themselves proved this can work wonderfully as a concept. Here it is extremely flawed though. My biggest issue is there is no variety between each character play through. They have different moves, weapons and some unique skills on a couple of them but they are fundamentally the same. When you take that into account along with the fact that each one of them plays through the same 6 locations fighting the same 20 ish enemies and same bosses and no matter how gorgeous Odin Sphere is, and no matter how nicely it plays it just becomes tedious. You have to play all five scenarios to see the ending and by the 4th character I was just feeling burnt out of it all.

Perhaps because it's an action RPG there is a greater downtime between the story sections that could have kept the mystery going for me to want to push onwards but I feel the narrative behind the game overall just isn't strong enough to justify the multiple perspectives. There isn't a huge mystery that gets unveiled or a surprise twist. Each scenario explains a few things more but I didn't find any of it compelling. Everything around the multiple protagonist formula here undermines the story and the mechanics. Some of the story arcs on each character don't quite match with some odd reasons to make sure the character does visit the snow mountain or lava kingdom etc. Having a food resource cooking mini game for levelling is a neat little idea but gets boring having to save ingredients and feed each character as a core way to level them up every time. Exploring never has anything new on different characters, same levels, same equipment. This feels like a 6 hour game padded out to a 30 hour game and the fairy tale esq setting and lore aren't strong enough to carry that.

I hate typing this as I wanted to love Odin Sphere like I did 13 Sentinels. I am however grateful to it for being the game that put Vanillaware on the map, the game that is almost like a later prototype they built on. I'm glad I played it, it's well made, and looks and plays wonderfully it's just lacking meat on it's bones.

I wish you really could just grow sheep from trees.

+ Gorgeous art design.
+ Fun , fast and fluid combat system.
+ Pleasant whimsical soundtrack and great voice acting (I played it in Japanese).

- The game loop is extremely repetitive and the story cannot carry nearly the exact same content from a slightly different view point. Only one real negative but it's a big one.

Neat!

I started P2 in September and instantly started riding high on the sheer Vibes. While Persona 1 struggled with its character relationships and nuances, Persona 2 absolutely excels. The opening minutes quickly establish your protagonist Tatsuya, the troubled punk at odds with the systems around him and how to function in daily life. Seven Sisters High is an odd school, as students fawn over their incredible principal as some sort of deity. His words are law, and people who exist outside the established authority are outsiders at best and threats at worst. Instantly, the game’s theme is established. The Accepted Truth is the Forever Truth among the population, no matter how ludicrous or unfair it may be. The power of rumors aids authority, as people avoid the unknown in favor of their safe, existing systems.

The other cast fill out the usual archetypes, but with compelling grounds. Lisa/Ginko is the overly attached crush, but that relationship is inherently built on a complicated framework. Lisa wants attention, but she doesn’t want it attached to her status as a foreigner. She’s yearning for something profound and sincere, but her teenage brain can only interpret it through base pleasures and drives. Tatsuya is nice and seemingly daring, so he’s a vessel for those wants. Reaching a real understanding of her needs requires her to evolve her understanding of the world and herself. She learns about herself when she learns about others. It's an excellent dynamic.

Eikichi/Michel often falls into the typical Dumb Bro role. Ryuji, Yosuke, Junpei, all taking their cues from him. Unlike the more traditionally attractive characters, the game isn’t all that interested in examining Eikichi’s abusive home. One character facing a specter of their complicated parental relationship is a serious, heart-wrenching affair. Eikichi encountering his stern, violent father is a joke. A laugh track at Eikichi’s expense, no big deal. It's an odd distinction and it's one that sticks out against the story’s heavy hitting scenes.

The other characters engage in their own personal soaps, with my returning beloved Yukino having evolved into a photography career after her school punk days. It's a great evolution of the character, and one that feels a little underserved. The first game never really engaged with Yukino’s punk life as anything more than a backstory, and it's a shame that the game doesn’t engage with how Yukino’s anti-authority streak likely influenced her current career choice. Maya, the protag of Eternal Punishment, is cool and considerate, while struggling with her own fragmented memories and resentments of traumas long past.


In October, I caught covid. Almost instantly, my motivation cratered as I struggled to progress much farther.

Stepping away from the game made it difficult to retain a lot of the facts and I ultimately just had to repeat what I did with Persona 1 and finally just watch the ending on youtube.

Which is a particular shame when this game absolutely whips when I’m playing it.

The biggest hurdle is the grind. The dungeons aren’t as purposeful as later entries, extending out game time with increasingly obtuse and unnecessary delays in plot advancement. The persona mechanic was certainly more freeing when any character can take on nearly any persona. But the game begins to expect certain survival tricks. If you aren’t picking from a very specific stock of persona with certain immunities, you’re essentially fucked at the end game. Grinding is your second best bet, followed by making the exact right choices at the exact right points in the game. Allowing yourself to miss a single missable upgrade can make any attempt at the final dungeons into a miserable slog with no clear route to success.

I guess the main thing I've learned is that writing only gets you so far with video games. If the mechanics are frustrating, people are only going to forgive so much in favorite of excellent storytelling. But if the mechanics are smooth and rewarding, people will forgive many more storytelling flaws. I'm not above admitting that about myself. I can accept the dark reflection, the shadow self. This is what Persona is all about.

Pretty neat that you can kill Hitler though.

Fumbled.

We are gathered here today not to mourn the passing of Free Radical, but to celebrate the fact that Free Radical once lived. We are, however, here to mourn Haze, which is a middling-at-best shooter whose story carries it until it crashes and burns just in time for the game to end. There is a wonderful, biting, powerful game tucked away inside of Haze's DNA, but it ultimately isn't the version of Haze that we got.

Haze is not an especially good game, which is okay, because Haze is a remarkably interesting game. I have no idea where Free Radical were getting off putting something this explicitly anti-American-invasion in a 2008 Playstation shooter, because the people who would have bought this game at launch would have been the exact kind of people too stupid to understand the sentiment. Six Days in Fallujah got announced the year after this came out. The War on Terror was cool, provided that you were from a certain subset of people who benefitted directly from the War on Terror. That person was the target demographic for Haze, and they weren't ready for it.

But for the overwhelming majority of a playthrough, the interweaving of narrative and gameplay in Haze leaves something like Spec Ops: The Line face-down dead in a ditch. Rather than the systems of play and story being at war with one another as they are in Spec Ops, Haze wants you to find the act of killing fun. Pressing L2 gives you a boost of Nectar, which makes you run faster, makes enemies glow, gives you a little rumble on your controller whenever you get a kill, and gives you an extra little dose every time you gun an enemy down. This encourages fast, aggressive play, always making sure you stay hopped up on Nectar; Nectar makes you better at killing, and killing gives you more Nectar. The actual gunplay is a little lacking, and you've got a remarkably limited selection of weapons, but the ones that feel good to use feel really good to use. Starting you off with a magnum with a report like thunder that practically blows the rebels in half when you shoot them is an inspired choice.

Your squadmates are similarly drugged out of their minds on Nectar, their bloodstreams flooded with enough stimulants to make E3-era Adam Sessler blush. I have to give praise to the writing for making me hate US troops even more than I already did. I imagined what it would be like to be an Afghani or Iraqi soldier, holding a rifle and tucked behind a blown-out brick wall, knowing that my country is being occupied by the stupidest fucking military the world has ever known. A battalion of jackboot dipshits, each of them spouting memes and quoting movies while they unload a hundred million dollars worth of munitions into an empty field. Tens of thousands of morons who never learned that they can breathe through their noses rather than their mouths, all getting into headbutt fights and giggling as they mow down civilians. It's not enough that they're evil, but they're also embarrassing, which might be the worse of the two. Getting killed by them isn't even dignified. It's like losing a footrace to a dog that someone bolted rocket thrusters to. If you also had the rocket thrusters, you'd win every single time, because you're a smart human. But you've got the misfortune of not being owned by a very rich and very committed master.

I'm getting off track. The point is that the narrative is sound, and the gameplay, while stunted, is still operating in harmony with the story. It works even better when you can't kill anything for a little bit, and the Nectar fades, and it becomes very suddenly clear how shit this all is. Not the game, neccessarily, but the act of gunning people down. The music stops playing. The rebels start screaming. You can see their corpses splayed out on the ground after you kill them. You have to commit to hiding and cowering when the bullets start flying, rather than sprinting out into the gunfire with bazookas under each arm and the hardest dick anyone has ever had. It's excellent. It's such a flawless integration of story into gameplay, but it ultimately can't keep it going for the entire runtime.

Free Radical were lined up for an Aaron Gordon backboard-shatterer, but they finished like 2005 Slam Dunk Contest Chris Andersen. The narrative was good for a while, if a little obvious — it was 2008 and you needed to be very obvious to hammer into the heads of Americans that war was bad — but it manages to trip over its own shoelaces by Bioshock Infinite-ing this shit and saying that the rebels are just as bad as the imperial pharmaceutical company invading their country for drug money. To Haze's (very) slim credit, it ends literally the moment before you find out if the entire rebel army is bad, or if it's just their leader. But it leaves a remarkably sour taste in the mouth that Free Radical felt the need not only to pull a punch, but to outright swing in all directions. It leaves you feeling not like this was a pointed takedown of capitalistic expansion and propaganda, but rather that it was Bart Simpson windmilling his arms and declaring that it's every side's own fault if they get hit.

When the narrative falls to pieces, it gets harder to justify excusing the way in which you interact with this world, because it's now clunky gameplay in service of a stupid story. The control mapping is completely unhinged. Losing access to Nectar is fine, but the feign death mechanic that replaces it literally requires you to lay on your back doing nothing for about fifteen seconds before you can get back up and rejoin the fight. Sit there and count fifteen seconds to yourself before you read any further. It's that long. You will be doing this multiple times per shootout. Black ops soldiers who are immune to Nectar frenzies get introduced, meaning that the only way to deal with them is to abandon your fun weapons and settle for whatever bullet hose gets the most rounds downrange the fastest.

At some point while playing a game and getting frustrated with some design decisions, you start wondering what the developers were thinking. This is a dangerous line of thought, because it's one bred from anger; the answer is almost always that an "obvious flaw" was something they were either compelled to include or forbidden from removing, often leaving the blame on the shoulders of the publisher. But no, Free Radical seemed genuinely pleased with every aspect of the game they released. They made their own graphics engine and proudly declared that the game was locked at 30 FPS because first-person shooters don't need to run at 60. It looks like shit, too, so it's not like this was a compromise being made for visual fidelity. Truly and honestly, what the fuck were they thinking?

Here's the Psychbomb cut of Haze. For one, we cut out the stupid subplot about the rebel leader secretly being a bad guy. Yes, there's historical precedent for opportunists rising up against tyranny during times of crisis and themselves becoming tyrannical, but that's not the character that we've been dealing with for 95% of the runtime. Get rid of the evil all along twist and keep him otherwise as is. Focus a bit more on the individual rebels, too; just as you had a squad of Mountain Dew-chugging bros in the first act, give us a squad of principled guerillas in the next.

Secondly, Nectar remains a factor for the whole game. We drop the whole "feign death" mechanic. Carpenter stays hopped up on Nectar and remains clad in his glowing armor and turns it back against Mantel. We recontextualize this in the second act not as a cool power-up, but as a twisted, tragic bit of neccessity. We make a shift over to guerilla tactics, focusing on traps and sabotage and making Mantel soldiers overdose on Nectar so that they kill each other, and we bust out our own Nectar boost in times of great crisis when there are no other options. We do an Edgerunners thing, basically; Carpenter is addicted to the Nectar, he knows it's going to kill him, but he can't stop taking it because it's his nuclear option that he needs to bust out against Mantel when shit really hits the fan. Mantel soldiers hopped up on Nectar should be borderline-unkillable juggernauts that need to be outwitted and not outgunned as they are in the current game.

Lastly, rather than the rebel leader accidentally firing a rocket at the carrier while you're still on it and then coming in with a helicopter to extract you, Carpenter volunteers to sacrifice himself. The Nectar is going to kill him within days at best no matter what he does, and he opts to do something truly good in his final moments. He busts out every dose of Nectar he has, rampages through the carrier in a horrifying whirlwind, slugs it out with his former squad leader just as he does in the current game, and makes sure that the carrier blows up with him and every other Mantel soldier in it. The Promise Hand clean up the rest of Mantel, successfully defend their homeland, and then burn down the Nectar fields so that nobody can ever use them again.

Sure, this one ends a little white savior-y rather than both sides-y, but there's no reason we can't just make it so Carpenter's ethnic background is from the same country he's invading. He's a fucking nothing character in the current game, so why not? It'd introduce some cognitive dissonance where he has to square what he believes or knows about his ancestral country with what he's being told about it. That's solid motivation for him to be hesitant and kick off his squad's doubts about his commitment to Mantel. It might not be a perfect idea, but I'm confident that it's better than the narrative we have here, brought to you from the same mind who gave us the stories of The Division and Rambo: The Video Game.

But now I'm writing fix fics for Haze, which should be the ultimate sign that I'm too far gone.

This might be the most well-known pieces of box art for a game that nobody played.