"As for military or state violence, I feel like that’s the purest crystallization of a type of legalized murderlust. It’s so completely farcical in the way the stated purposes (defense, security, etc.) differ from the actual outcomes. It’s a libidinal death cult with a serious bureaucratic veneer. The scene that it sets for our everyday life interests me. It’s like an ever-present background radiation of evil." - Ville Kallio in an interview you can read Here

I wrote a sort of strange poem about this game Here you can read. This was during that period of time when a lot of people were doing reviews as poems and I thought they were mostly lyrical and quite bad because it was all based on rhyming or strict meters, which is totally fine. I've created a controversy around myself of being judgemental of other peoples writing, but if you're going to practice and even do it poorly, you might as well do it here. Especially with comments off so people don't bug you. The reason I was only ever annoyed with it to begin with was anger management issues as a result of binge drinking and also overusing the site too much at the time, both things I've gotten a lot better about. Recently about a week ago I finally came to terms to myself as somebody who has in a very real sense been battling alcohol addiction for a long time, admitted to myself and to my real life community I actually struggle with alcoholism, and slowly taking steps towards self betterment and eventual sobriety there. So I want to somberly apologize for the hostile and standoffish precedent I created around me in relationship to that here, even though we are a while out from the last time I stepped on anybodies toes here.

This may be a strange note to start a review of Cruelty Squad (2021) on, but its a necessary one for a few reasons. The first is that to give off the impression I'm a detached observer merely 'peering into' the text from above, as some figure of authority goes against one of the main things the text is actually 'about'. Several times the established person running an organization of authority in cruelty squad blurb at you, in funny memetic ways that illustrate to you that they do not actually have their shit together, and are using their social authority to disguise that fact.

"I've been getting really into "hell". Both as a mindset and as something to strive for in an organisational sense."

"I'm the most powerful person in this room. I control this situation. Everyone's dancing to my tune..."

"I have thousands of followers. They say im blacksuppositoried and debased."

Some of us that are in charge of something think exactly like this. Anybody who has run their own discord or had a 'social media presence' definitely has this 'toying' psychology baked in deep. Occasionally this 'decisionality' is thrust onto you, for instance by making a semi successful game, the creator of Cruelty Squad, Ville Kallio, has opened a portal for themselves they cant close. They are now the 'center' of something, and probably had some of these same issues in the physical art community of being a 'worship statue'. They even admitted to this in the interview I quoted at the beginning.

"Sacrificing your friends to develop your CEO mindset so you can finally ascend to primordial-financial godhood. I feel like these things have sort of leaked into my own life, as I had to start a business due to the success of the game. I was reading Goethe’s Faust and it made me feel like I’ve accidentally made some sort of infernal pact at some point during development, which resulted in all of this. "

Problem is, if you identify with this feeling too much, you start thinking of yourself as a 'moderator of thought' and begin to think in ways the prior quotes from the game show. We have to ask ourselves, how is this way of thinking any different from the weird misogynist Pick Up Artistry thinking that these people don't 'deserve' your glory and should actually bow down to you? How easily can we divorce the world of middle management from larger systems of violence? Rather than using this power as a pure commercial toolset, Ville in the discord server for the game made it incredibly clear that transphobia will not be tolerated. You have to frontload yourself like that or you do completely self isolate and go CEO mindset. I could theoretically ditch all my friends tomorrow into a toxic sludge pit, alienate myself and start working on my Grindset and get a bunch of people to worship my every word. Make one of those stupid fucking paid to use discords. Pimp my patreon out constantly. Treat my connections with people in terms of a career path and not just people I like. Sometimes people say I'm one of the best writers on here and it freaks me the fuck out. It freaks me out that I self gloating something to that effect a few times to. The internet normalized all of these more primal urges to Control the world of violence around you. It's fucked. I mean for instance if you use the internet long enough you stop referring to other people as people, you start calling them 'randoms'. It's ok to be mad at commenters and guess their IQ levels when they even slightly annoy you or get on your nerves. It's ok to get so angry with people for doing something you don't like and letting your friends hang them out to dry for it publicly. It's ok to antagonize people with kindness just because they were mean to you once. Look I got the damn comments off in here. That's not because I'm afraid of you, its because I'm afraid of myself dude. I've done all of this stuff before and seen others do it on here. It's embarrassing.

There's this frustrating issue in videogame discourse in which, in order to try and self justify our time to ourselves, we talk about games as 'cultural objects' rather than effective experiences that change our way of viewing things. Most of this is the result of the 'video essay' style catching off like commercial wildfire, and thus imparting some sense of commercial value to the idea that you can 'speak around' videogames as literary texts. I believe the other big result of that is that we all sort of learned from having to undo the 'videogames as vehicles to violence' argument for a long time (and sometimes still do) that, crucially the connection between play and real life behaviors is thin. Gamers went through this moment where they had to learn about cultivation theory as much as they could to ward this stuff off but the problem is that by doing that we sort of nullified ourselves from getting into any sort of public political wanting. This desire to absolutely affirm that a game cant cause real life violence caused us to neuter our own discourse before it could really grow. We are just passive soyjacks playing with blocks in the cornor. We fucking infantalized ourselves through self domestication.

So that's part of the problem. The other part then is to try and get away from this we dont talk about this art form as 'things we learned' partially because learning from art is cringe, learn from academic Journals you room temp IQ having freak. When we do interpret a game text, we will interpret both the front and the back to the point it spoils the magic for others. For instance every video I've seen on Cruelty Squad that takes the work seriously can't help themselves but 'compare' the endings and try to analyze a discreet meaning from them. The game is set up like an ARG where the further you slip in the weirder you learn the world is (for instance a creation myth people believe in that own homes is literally about owning a home). It makes sense, because we were all taught to do this as a book report in school and shit, but it doesn't always translate cleanly to games. Videogames are a continuous act function you experience and push through. It's not like a movie where you merely just 'watch'. There's a reason why one of the most enjoyed novels in game enthusiast (watch out with that term buddy, Gamergate will start knocking on your door) peoples favourite book is House of Leaves, its because its a book you physically travel through, have you fight with to keep reading. You have to hold it sideways, sometimes you have to warp a few pages backwards for a bit. Videogames as narratives, even continuous ones and simple, are more like Choose Your Own Adventure novels, and you so don't see people asking you to analyze those right.

So it ends up putting Cruelty Squad in this awkward and frusterating temporal space, where on the one hand you really want to dig into the niche leftism that Cruelty Squad is existing. Where it pokes fun at stuff like veganism being connected to purity culture issues for instance. But you can't do that without everyone being on the 'same page' about it first and so now you have to back up and address that problem first. The lore of Cruelty Squad being so dense that you want to see somebody break into the mechanics of the story and figure out who the 'real villian' of the mystery is. But since we cant really get into all that without looking psychotic and freaky we just gleefully poke at each other to make the first move. Yet, art isn't about a 'really good conversation' or solving the damn mystery for everyone though. Art is an experience that usually wants to tell you stuff and make you reshape your world a little. I didn't get the other endings of cruelty squad because I'm not that obsessed with the game in that way. The internet can slowly teach you that people like me are normies and shouldn't open their mouths until they 'really beat it'. I know about the fucking Nick Land and Bataille references ok, I read a bit of these people but we dont need to pose as philosophers or completionists to talk about art and the world.

Cruelty Squads level Androgen Assault made me rethink the way I consider the police and the fascism associated with it. None of the police talk to you, they instantly fight you, but you learn throughout that level that the place is a horrifying cult with people testing on each other and the prisoners to Absurd limits. This is blunt and flagrant, your briefing even says that Magnus, head of the narcotics department, is testing on people and making shit difficult for everyone. It's a hard and uncomfortable level. The hallways are way too long. Everyone is running in slow motion. It made me rethink about the police as basically a grooming organization for people lost in their early life. They slowly teach people to repress everything, be violent, and fuck peoples lives up. That doesn't happen overnight, and its only upheld by baking people in the culture of fear and adult bullying. I hate these macho pricks, but they aren't some 'visceral' decision, they are a chemical nightmare scenario. The building for a precinct in the town I live has a few different things.

1. A viewable office from the street: So I saw what the inside of one of these guys offices looks like and its very drab and depressing

2. A plaque on the side dedicated to a confederate doctor

3. A giant fucking face construction on the side of the building, very similar to The headquarters of Mussolini's Italian Fascist Party (1934)

I thought about that stuff as I was working with a fucking horrible hangover today. I saw a bald pig on my way home from work near the bus starting some scene. I know now that this is a lifestyle the mother fucker was tricked into, and I learned it from a game, non verbally. I still hate the dude and would resist him but he was 'constructed', he doesn't have some sort of primal genetic code that made him join the Cop Cult. He's not some sort of low T brainlet normie NPC like the internet tries to convince me of. Just as much as women aren't fucking 'femoids' or any of this greasy internet dungeon speak. A lot of the internet sort of teaches you to dehumanize people like this, and not see where the violence is coming from. It's something you have to sort of unlearn one day at a time. Cruelty Squad is willing to meet you there. Today I this all hit me and I realized I don't want to moderate my fucking friends and stepped down from running a discord as a big attention seeking thing. I can't run around with a chip on my shoulder like that. There's a lot of great levels in Cruelty Squad that reillustrate facts like this, home ownership, office culture, reconstructing a scene of violence and blithe anxiety in a new way. That's art. Thats life. That's why I reccomend this fucking game.

Everyday is actually a battle, but until I die I will actually wake up and fight that battle till I'm snuffed out for good.

Orbital Companion

The perfect game to play right before moving, this nonverbal rumbly treat is all about using unique orbs as portals to transport between spaces to unlock doors and find more orbs. Most of the game is spent doing albeit simple puzzles involving the diferrent colored orbs and the worlds they are attached to. For instance the first orb is orange which you use to activate switches and walk across invisible bridges. Much of the mid game is spent trying to juggle these various orbs and the portals you activate with them in order to make progress and while only a few moments will have you truly stuck, the moment of realization of what to do is always pleasing and satisfying.

The lead level designer behind Cocoon, Jeppe Carlsen, has also worked on Limbo and Inside. Two other nonverbal puzzling oddities, that focus on visual spendlor and the satisfaction of solving a puzzle towards the ominous unknown with far less focus on complexity. This makes sense because in some ways a difficult puzzle can actually halt the entire momentum of the aciton and the world. I would refer to most the puzzles in Cocoon more as 'fidget puzzles' than full fledged head scratchers, wherein a lot of it is backtracking for the item that you need. You play as this cute little bug creature so you can only carry one orb at a time and for whatever reason you're forced to place them down in specific sockets. Dont want to lose them by accident! So a lot of it ends up being pick up ball A move it to the new location, go back, and do the same with ball B. Again, this can be tedious but it's also meditative, helped by the soothing electric ambient score that unlike in other games in this genre (Gris etc) compliment the visuals rather than call out to themselves.

The real bite here is the visuals, unfortunately, the website I'm posting through doesnt have image/gif support, but it must be said how vitally well done this is. There is no other game where opening a door has felt this good. This is due in part to the immaculate sound design, the clinking and clattering of mechanical parts whirling help set the atmosphere and, while often mixed a little too loudly for my tastes, are almost always densely developed and done well. It's hard to talk about the visuals and my hesitations, I think that the plasticene world aesthetic looks nice, but is a bit too 'silicone valley sci fi' in its approach to the cleanliness of everything. For instance the staircases work in the context of the spidery bug world we are in, but you can see stairs that have a similar spindliness in a few gaudy megamansions from time to time. More importantly, the world of Cocoon lacks ecological 'dirt'. The world is in many ways too clean, theres no grime over anything so it ends up having the same textureless shine to the objects. On the other hand, monumental changes in environment or large objects look gorgeous.

I think the biggest problem with Cocoon is that there's no dash button. The way the game is set up, you have a radial walk and a single input button, sometimes you hold that input. The issue is, your bug buddy walks a bit on the slower side so you find yourself sauntering wishes you could make a rumble/dash happen. On the other hand maybe that would make the experience too fidgety, but since the puzzles lack difficulty or depth, it does end up being a lot of monotonous gliding from space to space. It can feel hollow sometimes but, in my case at least, this actually helped the experience. I am moving, and I couldn't help but think of how equally hollow preparing and carry stuff from one location to another is. I'm as meager as this bug is, and while my own 'orbs' are just as meaningful as its, there's this quiet solemness that this isn't quite fun or boring. You can't dash in real life either, transport and movement...it just has this quality of ennui and melancholy attached to it, and I think Cocoon is at its best when it does have this sense of monotony. You know how to solve the puzzle, you figured it out a minute ago but now you have to go through the portal animation and pick the orb up and go place it somewhere.

There are also, strangely enough, puzzle bosses! They are functional! Most of them focusing on positioning over anything else. If you get hit it just resets the fight, no harm done. Most of them are spectacle boss fights so you dont have to worry about getting skill tested. With that said, I do feel weird killing them! It gives me a very shadow of the collusus conundrum to be killing giant monsters in this barren wasteland for my own gain. This sort of reflects the ultimate shallowness of Cocoon wherein the focus is so spent on you feeling like you 'have something to do' that there's no taking anything in or just feeling out an ecological space. Like, I'm almost sad this is a puzzle game because this aesthetic would be amazing for a walking simulator and even teases at that idea towards the end. The world lacks life and you end up robbing it anyways for your opaque goals.

Due to the non verbalness and lack of dialogue plot, this goal stays opaque until the very end, but it just ends up giving the experience a sort of moral numbness. I don't feel like I was even supposed to think about the giant spider I killed so much as that I bested it and now I get the nice orb. Time is not even spent on dwelling on its death. If we flash back to Limbo...this is sort of a disappointment by comparison! In that game we had this big gnarly spider chase us down and slaughter us dozens of times, but then when we amputate and kill it, its not 'well done' its gorey and gross, you feel uncomfortable and even a little lost. By comparison Cocoon doesnt stray into this territory, but because of how cosmicly indulgent the world is, and how everything is a puzzle room, you end up just thinking about whats beyond what you're seeing in a remorseful 'I wish the game went there' sort of way.

It's weird though, I'm not sure I can reccomend whether other people would get anything out of it. It's one of those games that looks good and knows how to plot a beat and keep puzzle momentum, but at the same time its a whole game of just very beautiful busywork with little to offer underneath. I think maybe the best way to tell would be to consider how you feel about school animation short films. For instance MILK DUST is a visual treat focusing on a grand inspirational world, but the moment its over it sort of hums to the back of your mind, buzzing there only to be pulled out randomly as a humored annoyance or 'oh yeah I remember'. Much like moving itself, I think this business but shallowness when you're not is sort of core to the feeling of moving and transportation generally. Like as an experience, Cocoon handles the core aspects of moving, that being the transportational tedium, effectively. Contrast that with the approach of say Unpacking which focuses on organizational coping as a form of zen. That being said, I can only say this from the perspective of extreme bias. I think its neat enough to give a try if you're in the mood for a more light and breezy eye candy take on the mechanics found in Inside or if you liked the scale of the similarly non verbal Tunic or Hyper Light Drifter. Regardless of how much it appeals to you, I certainly wouldn't say its something you need to get to right away.

Campfire Companion

When I first put together a now privated list on games made by notable figures that reflect on games on this website, I had done it with the intentions of highlighting how creative and brilliant our next door neighbors could be. More illustratively it was a list of games that I intended to personally review for the purposes of creating a sort of internal diagesis. We often laud and discuss games that are popular or part of a series, and often leave our more trite one off thoughts for shorter smaller experiences. The intention of the project was to illustrate how the 'alternative' no budget indie scene is not only coupled with what your favourite writers are saying but how they express their values and perspectives through art itself. Reflecting on interactive fictions and writing them are potentially not as seperate processes as we thought.

This project, which the intention of reviewing the works thereof mentioned being a more implicit goal of mine, was ultimately a failure and rather intense misstep. That's for an important reason: There is no coherent diagesis between a work like Magenta Horizon and Another Pokémon Game, they are just games 2 people that happened to be on here made, thus the 'dialogue' is not really as robust as I anticipated across the board. Besides, even if you have a small amount of internet clout sometimes, you probably don't want it to infect literally everything you try to do. I found myself in an attempt to stay fair and help usher thoughts towards improvement often focusing on weak editing and proofreading etc. Which given how niche and ultimately unplayed these works are anyway becomes less a form of friendly criticism and more a form of personal backseating and jeering through social media. Even if I dont like a creative work some writer on here made, going out of my way to cover it was missing the point that there is underlying beneath all of these more important things to be concerned about ie survival under capitalism or keeping your friends close in the wake of disaster. Improvements dont happen overnight, and of course most peoples first work is going to be rough and trying to give every single one of them the same level of serious attention can be discouraging in the face of these wider issues. I keep the list intact today hoping it remains a useful yellow page to some, but otherwise have shelved the underlying bitterness of the surrounding project only focusing on works I feel like actually speaking about.

I bring up this folly because its the sort of concern that A Phone Found in Tall Grass (2023) wants us to dwell in. It wants us to consider what we might be taking for granted. It's a work about relaxing and scrolling through your timeline consorting and joking with others while apocalypse unfolds all around you. The protagonist of the story is the recently unemployed twibber user Lia, who is immediately greeted by her partner Luna and their irl friend Alex as they meme towards and into the brink of an apocalypse. One of the most effective bits of the worldbuilding here is showing how irreverance and venting go hand in hand. Of course, in keeping with the times and adding drama to the story Lia has a private account with presumably no followers on it but for the most part people are brazenly comfortable with finding funny ways to say things are a bit fucked whether it be Alex commiserating about his conspiracy boomer dad or others pointing out how inane the government is being. Even being so smart as to show how that irreverance can lead into a distancing callousness of overly joking about disasters that are currently happening. Throughout this, we are often treated to a helping fake annoying ads as well. This shows not only how social media sites can function as networks of solidarity and connection, but also how they do to some extent neutralize the social playing field. Top executives are shown to be immature and get ratioed by randoms. Memes about a conference have more staying power than the official account bragging about the numbers etc.

Perhaps my favourite bit of writing in this is when Luna vents about Lia just arguing with people online but then realizes the uncomfortable hypocrisy of how dangerous the relevent activism is. We often find ourselves getting annoyed with loved ones in this way, operating too slowly or getting in feuds instead of 'logging off'. It becomes such a concern that it bakes itself as an ironic insult, one I've even recieved on here, that you should just log off and touch grass. Yet often we end up finding out that doesn't always meet people where they are at. Sometimes this frusteration doesn't agknowledge the fact that doing so has coupled with it a serious set of risks. Even in the case of 'just going outside' with decaying air quality in cities, wildfires, urbanist sprawl development, and queerphobia the most insightful people you meet online are probably agoraphobic for a good reason. The moment in this story shows that to great effect. More broadly the other great piece of writing is how, instead of focusing on some personal growth Lia has, the focus instead turns to a collective recognition that we often take the serenity of a space for granted. People noticed this irl with the borderline apocalyptic overtaking and dismantling of twitter by everyones least favourite billionaire comedian. On the one hand we know that these places suck, which is why we spend so much time joking around, but on the other hand the ability to connect and show ourselves through the web represents a space between the cracks of reality. There is a sense in which there's something to mourn when the infrastructure flails and breaks down completely. In order to illustrate allow me to point out something bold here: The recent dismantling of twitter hasn't been stopped by other rich people or the governments because of a combination of ineptitude, apathy, and a recognition that the people that use these spaces to do important activism are people that work. Your manager will almost always ask you to come in regardless of if the wheather is about to crash the windows apart because they have your number, but the people in your area trying to help you live? They need these spaces to get to you (though of course this can be a double edged sword to see: the fact people use the app in this story to meet up doxes them).

More to the point if you share the politics of solidarity and worker struggle I tend to display on here, A Phone Found in Tall Grass has you covered. All you have to show is a couple queer people trying to live their lives in moment of disaster to represent why junevile actions of the powers that be cant be trusted. Short term gain with long term consequences is a constant theme throughout the story, showing how silicon AI industries will only think about shipping product and demonstration advertisement. The mismangement of resources and instensifying of collapse in this case is clearly touching on concerns of AI recently, be it self driving cars or industry wide diminishment of labor. Yet it also reminds me of how this seeming inevitable collapses connects to the synergisms between corporate and government incompetence to. For instance the energy crises connected to global politics, wherein petrol is still made nessecary as a continuous short term decision at the expense of long term climate issues, creating a nasty feedback loop of having to reinvest in the industry that's hurting us. In this sense this is one last effort I have to commend the story and its worldbuilding for: Portraying Empire as fallible. Disaster strikes first in America and Britain, contrary to what people expect. For those of us still slumbering through this recognition, we were shaken awake during covid to just how broken these systems are. Apocalypse maintained itself in the form of the pandemic in these two Empires and here the same is shown. In spite of the GDP, both of these countries have particularly weak logistical infrastructures and not a serious form of internal defense preperation, so the hubris is met in change.

I recognize how intense what I've covered is, but it really goes to show just how well the worldbuilding in A Phone Found in Tall Grass works. One of the best ways this is achived is via the use of images. The memes and photography from our central cast gives humor and presence to their voices, and allows their agency to shine through. This is an aspect that this sites lack creates a more stuffy and cynical atmosphere, despite our best intentions it can make us all come off more humorless and petty having to link in image attachments from off site (Risking a tangent here, this is one of the other reasons I dropped the beforementioned project, it starts to feel like empty air when you don't have any integrated visual medium to work with. Which is also why I've tapered off how many of these I write in the past year and why among other reasons I struggle to value this website as a platform for meaningful discourse and connection. Instead I use this place to push urgent recommendations to peoples feed while I construct a blogging space elsewhere.). This is all been represented by a more discreet member of this site. While I don't want to focus on this too much out of a passing respect to the artist's privacy, part of the benign accuracy of the story comes from a deep and personal understanding of both how people can exist on the margins of joy within popular culture, but also how the often juttering multiplicity of 'internet clout' affects somebodies relative experiences. In some ways its spontaneous but in others its pure numbers. Being in different spaces by design makes you aware of different forms of popularity and how they can effect you. One aspect that suprised me that shows this is that this isn't even Niandra's first interactive work because of how little they bring attention to it.

Despite this humbleness I have to be honest and say that on the level of writing, this is probably my favourite work I've played that has come out this year. It's deft and graceful in avoiding the traps of allegory or mere imitation, A Phone Found in Tall Grass operates as a salve to remember what we have and what we use the internet for, to relax, laugh, and share our struggles somewhere for the world to see.

I also reccomend the much more short thought piece about internet solidarity and its potential historical uniservalism in Vanitas (2023) and if you're interested in what I was musing about energy politics, the game Half-Earth Socialism (2022) which imagines an escape from this cycle towards collapse.

Energy Drink Companion

While the low fi beats to sleep to aesthetic of this represents as a decent introductory reference point for building confidence that rhythm games aren't that hard. It would be a tenuous one, since as Patricia covers it doesn't introduce the concept of sycopation at all, its just a 'clap along' game with several different inputs.

It's interesting to see that people are bringing up comparisons to rhythm heaven because in actual fact I think this game only 'works' if you dont know that game exists and dont get access to it. I might not ever beat rhythm heaven but even what I've played of it I know its way more engaging than this is. For instance in the first 3 levels of Rhythm Heaven you have tap, drag, hold input varience introduction. In Melatonin you dont have that level of varience introduced until 10 levels in. Melatonin wants to be easy in order to guide the player through its highly cultivated visual experience rather than test the player. Sure I got stumped in a few situations but only because it relies so heavily on visual clap along that are often unclear. It became at most a matter of resetting once or twice. Meanwhile in rhythm heaven you might get stuck on a level for a while and might even have to redo the ealier ones again.

So if it relies so heavily on its visual stimulus what is there to say about it? Well the funny thing about trying to write around visual art is that any reader could easily just look at it and decide for themselves which is why I tend not to focus on that too much in most of my write ups. Here though its worth stressing that when you actually are enveloped in this pastel wonderland and having to input in response to it, its appalling. There are a few cases where they remove the visual stimulus like for example in the Mind level where the character gets sleepy and you only see a fraction of the screen. It becomes more bearable to play in this condition. It's often better to input based on sound queues to instead of simple visual responses for a few of the levels as well

The symbolism itself is also both trite and exceptionally late capitalist in its blunt depiction of a dreamscape as economically fueled. There's no surrealism in this, this isn't utilizing the bizzare of dream logic or its distress in the way Un Chien Andalou or firths Sock series would, we aren't working with the dream brush of a Dali here. We aren't even working with a disneyesque one ala Alice and Wonderland (1951). It's a collagan mash of Late Burton and the weakest late 10's cartoon network animation (Bee and Puppycat and We Bare Bears).

If you can believe it theres also some frusterating UI choices to. If you beat the combination levels at the end of each night and press the button you are throw immediately into the 'hard mode' version, but you can bypass it by just going to the map. If you aren't playing the hard mode versions of the levels before, why would you want to now. If you want to go back to try levels from previous nights you would have to rifle through a bunch of menus to get there to even look at a section of them, rather than just have it be a simple overworld. Trying to make the overworld 'immersive' at the expense of actually being able to just discern which levels you've done is one element I complained about in my Pizza Tower diagnostic. I was being nice about it there but now I'm just enourmously frusterated in retrospect, if you are proud of your level design why stuff it away in a cupboard like that? A non-discerning eye might try to blame it on something like Mario Galaxy for introducing the idea of an immersive hubworld. I would actually say this is more the consequences of even earlier Mario games (World, 3, etc.) and its 'nostalgic' reintroduction recently with the 3D World titles. If I felt any softness for either of these two games, that it had a rare moment where I was enjoying it. Its been sullied by treating their own gamespace in such a segmented fashion. Even with the game as short as it is, there should be as little interrupting me from entering levels as possible. It's a design approach that puts the idea of difficulty scaling over any desire for mastery. What it ends up incentivizing is not a gratification of completing certain sections but instead, fully restarting from the beggining and going as perfect as you can through each.

What we have is a game too afraid to commit either to strange visual abudance or difficulty scaling. Trapped in a limbo of their own curation, your protagonist limbers in a wasteland of millenial tropes. Letting tindr and monster energy imprint into thier headspace while they continue the stereotypes of Avacado Toast consumption. While the stereotype never arises to a level of offensiveness that a racial one does, its nonetheless irritating and vacuous. If its a parody of that landscape, its too cheeky to stand for anything.

If anybody accuses you of not engaging with art outside your comfort zone, I give you permission to roll your eyes and throw something like this at them, ask if this is what they want you to try out instead. If it is, dont let them pester you. No need to have such a somambulant relationship with the world.

🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕 Fuck This 🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕

I think this utilization of indie devs as a guerilla advertising force is enormously fucked up. It'll almost definitely dilute the indie scene and what videogames we talk about going forward. However, it's nothing new, in the sense that liscensed flash game shlock to sell products have been around forever (remember those LCD happy meal games? It's just like that but updated). It's a polished face to an age-old exploitation. Instead of giving the substanceless game the respect of actually getting direct scorn, which would ultimately embolden the product's aim of attention grabbing. Or otherwise meming around the existence of this which would flaccidly play right into its hands. Let's do a more 'macro informative' approach. Here's some interesting articles on recent abuses from the company in question to sate the appetite a bit:


Pandemic Racism
"McDonald’s actions speak louder than words. The reality is that 80 percent of McDonald’s majority Black and Brown workforce don’t have access to paid sick leave. That is dangerous under normal circumstances; during a global pandemic, it’s deadly." McDonald’s is Hiding Policies That Perpetuate Systemic Racism Behind Woke-Washing

Sexual Harrassment
"According to the lawsuit, since at least 2017, AMTCR knew about sexual harassment and allowed it to continue, unabated, by supervisors, managers, and coworkers at various of its McDonald’s restaurants. The harassing conduct, which was mainly directed at young, teenage employees, included frequent unwanted touching, offensive comments, unwelcome sexual advances, and intimidation. As AMTCR failed to adequately address the complaints of sexual harassment, many workers found the working conditions so intolerable that they had no choice but to quit." McDonald’s Franchise to Pay Nearly $2 Million to Settle EEOC Sexual Harassment Lawsuit


Corporate Malfeseance
"According to the SEC’s order, McDonald’s terminated Easterbrook for exercising poor judgment and engaging in an inappropriate personal relationship with a McDonald’s employee in violation of company policy. However, McDonald’s and Easterbrook entered into a separation agreement that concluded his termination was without cause, which allowed him to retain substantial equity compensation that otherwise would have been forfeited." SEC Charges McDonald’s Former CEO for Misrepresentations About His Termination

Check out The McDonald's Videogame (2006) by the dev team Molleindustria using Flashpoint to foster a better understanding of these corporate ghouls.

Convulsive Companion

There are parallels to be drawn between hunting game and the proliferation of achievement hunting. As a trend achievement hunting started to pick up steam and become a social resource on the Xbox, a console whose american lineup franchise was military shooters. Over time, this achievement acquisition would become overabundant and doled out in every game as much as possible. Thus the connection between these two modes of 'gaming' began to merge, the 'gaming' of slaughtering a deer to make as a trophy on your wall and the 'gaming' of getting an achievement which dropped 40 gamer points into your xbox live account. Fast forward 15 years and now this has extended to steam achievement percentages breakdowns. How to get 999 armor on slay the spire that only 7 percent of other people have, these obsessions with tracking down 'big game'. Literally 'achievement hunting'.

The killing of animals for sport has always been done as a social activity, after the animal is dead, its customary to take a picture of you next to it or turn it into a 'trophy', display what you gained and then post that gore to all your similarly excited friends. It's important to start by building it up in this way, catch a few fish, then some venison, etc. Then those are really obsessed with gaming might begin to poach for the 'exotic' game. To find and display their experience of stuff nobody else has caught yet, its always an unfair relationship because the gamer has a weapon that the game can't defend against. In this case the game sits there and the artillery is my words. You might be wondering why I'm so adament in this parallel, I think over time database websites and the obsession with 'completion' and 'display' has become analogous, not in morality but in modal relations. This game This is a game sits here innocently and I come by and tear into it noting that I've finished the experience and now I'm going to tell you why it's the downfall of man or instill my own social desires over the 'carcass' of it. Here the carcass is finishing it and telling you about it. Regardless of how good or bad it is I can at best dissect it excitedly for everyone else to see or just broadly smile next to it and give callous words. The result is similar, I'm promoting the concept that its for my use as a persona, that I wield my power over it.

There's a sadistic tendency here I think in this sense, one that is ultimately inescapable and in actual fact even promoted by these platforms. To launder these experiences as a grand concept of selfhood, to enclose the work in your own image. Then this snowballs into developers themselves having to be excited about also taxidermying their projects. Get as much feedback and warp it continuously for their excited audiences. Grafting and patching might as well be one in the same at that point, nothing in place, everything is the alpha production in this sense.

This may seem like a rather pessimistic and extreme way to talk about this 19 year olds rudimentary mario clone, I have no indictments toward them or this work on principle. I cant help but think though that I've continuously been seeing these sorts of freeware projects on Steam instead of Itchio and Gamejolt, wherein Steam asks for a 100$ surcharge with a very poor dynamic for displaying your work on your own terms. Games as commerce become taxidermied more 'cleanly' on steam, the achievements are embbed in, theres these stupid stickers you sell for like 5 cents. I've mentioned this all in my Horny Spell post, the fetid economic dynamics of that shit platform. I've felt this resentment spread though beyond that point. I resent that this work sits here with the same potential to be 'assessed' as everything else here. I resent the fact I'm 'gaming'. I resent gamers. I abhor the destructive impulse that comes with 'analyzing' the obscure. This should probably not even be on here to be 'shot at' in the same way everything else is because this is a prototype, when we shoot snide comments at shit like this it endangers the work through discouragement, which we only feel comfortable doing because we 'completed' it. It feels like I'm killing an exotic being with my words. I resent the fact that even talking about this work opens the possibility that now other people will seek it out and poke fun at it. I don't want any more trophies in my collection. This fundamental shame is hard to move past, to the point that I wrote 6 different versions of this script before giving up. On top of that, it feels also that now I've moved out of the realm of my trophies being endearing and enjoyable, now they seem to disturb people and for good reason. It gets more nuanced than that, but I think this more than anything else is the best vector I can describe this through. It's fundamentally why I need to make my own blog, my own exit. Create a reservation of good 'game' and not a resort for the slaughter of art. There's a better way than this, there has to be.

Tower Companion

"For years now people have been predicting that games would soon be made out of prefabricated objects, bought in a store and assembled into a world. For the most part, that hasn't happened, because the objects in the stores are trash. I don't mean they look bad or [that] they're badly made, although a lot of them are. I mean they're trash in the way that food becomes trash as soon as you put it in the sink. Things are made to be consumed in a certain context, and once the moment is gone they transform into garbage. In the context of technology those moments pass by in seconds. " - Bennett Foddy, Getting Over It rail section

Comedic Game Jam april fools VN about going on a tinder app and hooking up with doors. As a result of this premise it plays into 20s memetic language like 'bruh' and 'sus' on the one hand and for the sake of brevity turns most of the characters into short archetypes with end cards to match. It also has a great sense of color design and general UI flourishes for instance the keys icon spinning when hovering over choices is a great touch. What gets to me here tho is that if you took this premise beyond just stock anime archetypes you have great presentation that would make the concept of dating a door actually work to good effect. As such it feels like a prototype of a game with a lot of potential. This is most primarily seen in the 'Commandoor Locke' route where you can get a jail cell door to drop their tough guy act and melt for you. It may seem odd but I really some of the best art exposes itself through the aspect of the interactions of anthropomorphizations that haven't been considered yet. Whether it be birds (hatoful boyfriend), hedgehogs, or people turned into battleship parts (erostasis), or predator prey relationships (Tom and Jerry and Loony Tunes) theres a core part of the human desire to find seriousness in a story of silly representations. To find the confines and stretch them to what makes sense to tell a dramatic story. That might sound lofty or pretentious but honestly it goes all the way back at the very least to 1900s texts like Alice and Wonderland and Winnie the Pooh. Aesops Fables if you want to be incredibly generous.

So in a way Love Next Door represents the core frustration I have with the Game Jam industrialization at large, its a lot of concepts that are so unrealized they leave the audience wanting desperately to see anything more of them. Doors as romantic objects of player affection may seem like a joke, but its obvious just through playing this that a door can serve many different purposes and have character. Doors can be fancy or utilitarian, wartorn or hurt. Doors can have gold handles, brass ones, etc. Hell the existence of this game in itself proves that maybe the idea that people are 'as boring as a door' is actually wrong!

I guess the fundamental problem for me is that this is an overproduction of a lot of new and unique assets and concepts in a situation with a cruel relationship to copyright protections. It's nobody in particulars fault but when I see entire shoddy works like this my impulse is not to move on, my impulse is to possibly rewrite, mod, or otherwise reconfigure these works. It's not 'my work' though to do that, even if I don't get litigated directly it would only take a few days on the announcement of the idea for people to say I'm just plagerizing mechanics from these jams. So it begins to feel less like a culture of cute ideas and passion projects, and more like auto generated hierarchical ideas with which people can 'lay claim' to concepts for future use.

This point of course sounds painfully overambitious from somebody who hasn't made games at all, I'm only describing an unrealized personal impulse here. Yet, if I'm thinking that then its likely a lot of other people are to, and so the drive becomes 'I better stake my flag' rather than producing towards some goal. So I'm left in this awkward spot, on the one hand Love Next Door does everything it sets out to in a comedic tone, on the other hand it feels like a work that by its very existence is negating the future of its own concepts in this way. Has it occurred anybody else that anybody who creates a world featuring a talking candelabra would be under threat from the disney corporation for being too similar to Beauty and the Beast's Lumiere? To add to that, recently Winnie the Pooh finally became public domain but the dark part of it is that it has to be the old antiquated winnie the pooh designs, using the newer cartoon depictions would put you in the slammer. So thus Commander Doore lives and dies in this tiny jam work, this idea of mascots abandoned is a theme I explored so thoroughly in my old Yo! Noid 2 post that saying any more would be begging the point.

These games are clearly not made for mass consumption, it would be absurd to get annoyed at them unless they did something actually offensive. So, i'm only ever frusterated at these works from this viewpoint, an editor with no hope of inclusion, cursed to spectate as ideas get churned and then glazed in amber by the elusive wrath of propertarianism. I want a serious dating door game, I want to have a fictional crush on a door, just as I do on Ponies, and vampires, and all sorts of nonreal monstrosities that we attach ourselves onto! Now it might not happen (like sure you can just say 'well ask for permission then but I'm talking about a systemic problem here...). But my weird desires aside, this post could have been about any small work. It could have been anything. So it might as well be on a weird funny dating game joke that literally nobody cares about. Because hey, even if you think I'm totally off my rocker, at least you get to know that this exists :3

CN: Shower Thought

Bookshelf Companion

"As all partings foreshadow the great final one, so, empty rooms, bereft of a familiar presence, mournfully whisper what your room and what mine must one day be. " - Charles Dickens, Bleak House

About a month ago I moved out of my parents house for the first time, and I just want to say I'm very glad I played this first before I moved out because I absolutely would have done what the text here depicts. In Minimalist (2017) you pick everything up to get rid of it, and then you are left with an empty space afterwards.

For a very short time period in 2018 I fell into a few different rabbit holes. I was out as a girl to most of my online friends but still struggling to convince the rest of the irl population I was (depressingly, I still deal with this). Most of those rabbit holes are rather dark, Otakudom, Scientism, interest in reactionary arguments (ie the peterson religiousity trap, skepticism of NB people, etc.). These are all terrible, there was a lot to like about me in this time and I wasn't some horrific bigot but I was a dumb suburban white girl with no political compass. A seemingly more benign interest was in the Minimalist movement, as a lifestyle and aesthetic. A mixture of literal CEO mindset shit like wearing only 1 shirt, and living space decisions like abandoning as much furniture and extraneous shit in your life as you can. I watched stupid ass movies like Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things (2016) on netflix. Consume a bunch of youtube videos which were an aggregate of Tiny House glorification, lifestyle aesthetic videos that showed bedrooms as if they were hospital chambers, and a touch of 'minimalist philosophy' like thinking Diogenes of Sinope was the only good philosopher because of his dedication to 'minimalism'. To illustrate here's a genuine excerpt of what I said from around the time to my girlfriend in support of how I have a smaller rating scale:

"Like in my opinion I've started realizing that minimalism is more or less how I already operate

I'm all about trying to focus on 'good' art, 'good' people (though that can be a tad more complex), etc.

Minimalism is all about trying to focus on what you like, what's helping you in life

Trying to enjoy that, and then discarding the clutter"

In retrospect this plays right into the insecurity about having 'good mental hygeine'. You see it all the time in reflexive anti consumerist sentiments. Later that same year I would buy a bunch of 'girly clothes' and throw a good 3/4ths of my boy wardrobe in the trash. 'Thats it, I dont need anymore things'. This seemed like a logical step of maturity from understanding how my family threw away all the gamecube game boxes and put it in a giant CD case. They even threw away the gamecube itself because logically, the Wii can run all that stuff now anyway. While I heavily disagree with doing that now, at the time I thought well thats minimalism isnt it, no need to keep plastic trash around the house. The problem is that logical next step would be to throw away every game disc for the playstation or xbox since the computer can technically run it. Why not take this 'digital nomadism' to its logical extreme? Why have any objects at all?

...

Well, it's not like I had some profound realization from playing Minimalist, by this point a half decade later I already recognized how silly and empty it is to have no furniture. Hell, if anything woke me up to it its probably the opening of Cruelty Squad (2021) which depicts just how pathetic and depressed doing that actually is. However, Minimalist did make me recognize that I probably shouldn't just abandon everything. I brought some books I loved from before I left, I haven't touched them at all because I read most of my books online but its nice to know that they are there just in case. More importantly, I had panicked about how many loads of laundry I have to do and that I should trash 3/4ths of it again, but this jolted me from following up on that.

More broadly, Minimalist is short and small, to the point its almost unsatisfying. These 'one room' bitsy games are, by accident or intentionally in direct commentary with the first ever bitsy game released Where did I put it? (2016) by Patrick Hale. In which you explore your small space to find something abstract you lost in messy home. Here, its inverted to be an attempt to lose everything. To lose the ego attached to 'objects' rather than trying to find it. Here's what I think is clever though, there's an emptiness in BOTH texts due to a lack of an ending. In one you find out what you're missing but never find it properly, theres no end credit loop like in other bitsy games. Here, you lose that, but you also lose the ability to prompt any more dialogue boxes since you just got rid of all the objects by interacting with them. In Where did I put it? you can technically loop the dialogue thoughts forever in an infernal mindtrap, here you have the opposite, the infernal mindtrap in not having mental prompts.

Every time you choose to own or release an object from your home, you're making an implicit decision of 'memory' just as much as of identity. Having an object anchored lets you remember what you had, so the allure of digitizing all of these memories into the computer makes sense in theory but the problem is the complexity of it never quite goes away. In 2020 or so I lost every single piece of memory stored on my computer. The reaction images, pictures of discussions I had with my ex, etc. It was devastating. Made worse by the fact I just broke up at the time with her and found out that my old discussions with her in Skype are lost to time. At least my version of skype, I lost everything. In a way this is privileged, because most people have more serious versions of this that are marginalized. Being kicked out suddenly from their home, having an abuser destroy their objects, having to flee in a war. By that reasoning, I've come into this realization of memory in its relationship to objects a little late.

On the literary level, I always knew it was there. Yet never really wanted to accept it personally, because I'm a 'digital girl'. However as both these texts accurately represent there is no real distinction between physical hoarding and digital hoarding in both how objects can arrest you and in how 'freeing' from them is just as solemn. I could just as easy consider these databases a form of memory hoarding. At any moment I could panic about how I 'dont remember anything' and try to frantically categorize what I played, listened to, and watched. I've experienced so much art at 25 that its running that panic of incoherent clutter, and odds are if you're reading this the same is likely true for you to. I'm failing in for instance movie trivia and constantly feeling I need to play catch up and create flash cards, only to then simplify it. One day I'll spend trying to categorize every 3D platformer I've played and want to play, the next I'll say to myself 'ok fuck it, only 3D mario matters now or whatever'. Do you remember everything? Or do you like me often find yourself checking quietly in a tab to make sure you're getting the information right? How good is your recall? What is really forgettable to you and how do you organize the stuff you want to remember?

Anyway, I could waffle about this all day to no fruition, but instead I want to just point out something. In Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy (2001) you have long voice acted cinematic conversations with the NPCs to move the story along, they are entertaining and endearing. However when you try to speak to them after they tell you what to do, they simply will not talk to you or repeat themselves. They'll tell you basically to leave them alone and go do this. The first time this happens its surprising, because the norm is that you should be able to talk to the dialogue givers for repeat information whenever you want. Similarly to expectations, a person who has played a lot of early JRPGs and point and click games, are going to find the lack of objects you can look at and get dialogue from in Chrono Trigger equally suprising. Yet in both these games it makes sense to do without even though it leaves behind an 'eeriness' for the player. The player being forced to either remember or recognize that they are bothering is more immersive. These 2 games, Minimalist and Where did I put it are not immersive by comparison, they comment on videogame form itself. It's limitations and how those limitations can reflect onto the player. See, this comment response the author left on the page is in my view the real ending.

"Thanks! I wanted the 'end' of the game to be a time to reflect, since there's literally nothing left to do since you've willingly got rid of everything you own. I felt like explicitly stating the character's reasoning to the player would detract from the player coming to their own conclusion. Yours is totally valid, but others might have thought of something else- maybe the character is going off to become a monk? :)"

The real end game is being so distressed that you try to interact with the creator to find a catharsis for the fiction to make sense. Because the 'ending' of the game in the text is so unreal that you cant ever feel certain its really there. After playing enough bitsy games now I've realized not having an ending is just a running bit between these people, probably a satirical response to the 'looping' thats built into the engine when it does end. You'll have to find closure somewhere else. Yet outside of this we should be comfortable with the prospect that we might just be missing the conclusion, or that there never was one in the first place. Not every memory exists to be recalled evenly, and not every game exists to be concluded upon. It's both the great curse and the benefit of gaming as an art form that it brings with it an ambiguity of intentions and expected results. Sometimes its better to just be at peace with it, for instance there was never any 'conclusive' aspect of Gasters in Undertale, yet its there and in many ways that unknown quality makes the game better. At the same time if it doesn't make sense I feel strongly that its fair to think it may be a sly commentary within genre conventions.

In closing, both these games are 'forgettable' except in rare shower excursions, but to lament or feel shame for the mental clutter they bring is silly. It was an experience that happened so theres no use in drowning it just to try and find the top ten list of all games of all time. One should not be so quick to expunge themselves of all consumption or desperately organize it for ego alone. I think its better to just let it all float out there like the junk it is. I'll keep my wardrobe intact, and my word of advice is that you probably should to.

"Actually you can not forget what has happened to you. So, don't trust your memory" - Negativland, This is Not Normal


* I never finished it. I took a 400 course I failed because I was supposed to read through this and couldn't stand it. However, it sounds appropriate enough and that's what matters. Originally I was gonna quote Trainwrecks being mad at somebody in his chat for calling his house empty but I couldn't find the clip. The only reason I mention this is because it reinforces my point about 'mental clutter'. I watched that clip at some point and now I cant fucking find it, I spent 20 minutes trying to do so before giving up. I don't even like the guy I just thought it was funny but whatever, thats life. "So it goes" - Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 'Wrong about the events of Dresden ' Five

Content Notice: NSFW discussion, mild feminist observations, Market analysis

Musical Accompaniment (looped)

It's a jigsaw slide game where you click on two squares of a larger image and swap them to complete the image. In this case, its naked anime women, often of a folk mideval or halloween variety. All white skinned cis women with these absolutely placid stares. No girl in here does the classic anime aheago, in part because 4 out of the 20 'levels' is just a slightly changed version of the same girl wearing a big hat.

I'm not somebody of a firm moralist streak. For instance there's a fairly easy slam dunk critique here that the slaughterhouse B roll 'chopping' of womens bodies and mixing them around that makes this jumble of flesh and genitals you have to properly taxidermy whole again is as objectifying as it gets. However, to the extent this is a fair criticism, it matters a lot less to me than real life issues like wage gaps or structural transphobia. In fact I've argued before that obsessing over obviously sexual content as if its a plight against women is missing the point because sexual pleasure comes out of a connection between objects where they objectify each other. I wont relitigate it here. You can read that point here if you're interested. It's just so much to say it would be contradictory rhetoric for me to take a stab here.

If we just think about the pure mechanics, in spite of it being obvious shovelware. I can't truly posture that I learned nothing from playing. It did give me a sense of spacial awareness of the body and spacial reasoning in general, and due to the fact the difficulty does not actually increase I did eventually get pretty good at doing the image puzzles quickly. However the sexual component of this text is actually at odds with itself do to how all of it is just them posing with no penetration or anything, and there's a looping dentist type lounge music song adorning it all. It gives an eerie quality that makes me think less of any arousal and more of a serial killer butchering a corpse to classical music.

One of the reasons I felt 'something' is that I was playing fast with the intentions of getting my 30 cents back within the 2 hour refund window just to see if I could. I saw there was 20 levels and I thought 'I wonder if I can beat it in time'. I got to the end in 70 minutes. However this very cynical speedrun motive on my part reveals a whole underbelly of the Steam Platform as a marketplace. Were this to be free or non refundable I would have had a remarkably more disturbed experience but that sensation got rerouted. I had in effect created an absurd goal that prevents any feeling of forlorn wistfulness in the moment on shovelware, in my mind there was no time for that. This commodification goes one foot deeper. The reason why anime porn shovelware is so popular on steam is that it by design fills the niche its going after pretty well. Steam as a platform asks for an upfront platforming cost of 100 dollars. In order to make your money back on a 1 dollar game you need 100 people to buy it and not refund it. Since its with your labor the best way to profit is to put as little labor as possible into the work. The trick of making it porn related is the important part because if you can get people to feel gratified they wont refund it but also by making it porn you guarantee that anybody that wouldn't like it wont review bomb you since you need to buy the game to rate it. This entire artifice forces by design developers to basically game the system in this way. The only reason I got this at all is because of the stupid steam badge resell money. Valve is not as evil a gaming corporation as they come, however the dominance of their digital platform is such that needless devs are stressed to make works that make back their 100$ publishing fee by design. As such, the game needs to constantly 'titilate' the player as much as it can get away with. Whether it be through bright flashing casino visual flair like Vampire Survivors, achievement spam like Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, or literal tits in the titilation like Horny Spell the general valuation is to keep the player engaged so long as to not realize at the very least 2 hours passed.

Steam as a platform is a flea market garbage place where everything is valued in level ups, badges, purchasable cosmetics, endless discounting tactics, devs are given no control over the layout for their store pages. Itchio is so much more developer friendly its not even worth mentioning, but the sad reality is thats not where the money is. Thus this titles pseudo guro eerieness is not a glitch so much as literally what consumption forces incentivize when all games are boiled down into 'competitiors' by attention economies and self invested unpaid wage labor. The attention economy is always itself a gamble and usually requires effective advertising campaigns so its better to just fulfill the base desires of the players you can pull in from the tags.

Even by this incredibly cynical economic metric then, Horny Spell has probably failed to make its money back. There is only 1 user review, and while the amount of purchasers is not accessible information, the fact there are 0 plays on this title at the time of writing before I got here, is telling. However, the question should not be 'did the developer achieve their economic goal' because quite frankly its this vague competative thinking that obscures the reality that, in my view, everyone should be able to achieve the economic goal of not worrying about rent, food, etc. because the system that puts a price on basic necessities in the first place should be undone.

I feel the question should moreso be 'is this really how we want to be titilated?' that question depends very much on what you're actually input into it. It can range everything from achievement spam to rouguelites to various porn game genres. However I feel like it's worth asking it towards Steam, as a platform itself: Is this how we want to consume?

I don't think it is, I pirate games or hell even buy of GOG sometimes in part to avoid the constant 'player is online' and 'external achievement' hell. I prefer almost every other way to get games than from Steam because I fundamentally think that the platform hijacks my mental processes and overwhelms me with so much of a library that my only response is to rip open new cheap games instead like they are funkopops or card packs. Horny Spell is not a reflection of authentic sexual desire, its a desperate facsimile of what Steam aka Valve inc. want.

When I put it that way, I kinda feel sorry for the poor bastard...

"Do you have a favorite? Me? It's hard to choose. They're all my children." - Chunkopop G-Tech Exec

Musical Accompaniment (just choose to listen to however much of this that you can before you dont feel like it, my Music accompaniment guy is on strike right now).

So they took the Super Mario 3D World physics, movement system, and powerups and threw them into an open sandbox level with the benefits of Odyssey's collectible design of not disrupting your play on picking up the collectible. I really disliked how Odyssey handled its moons, many of them just being haphazardly littered in the playspace, in deserts etc. By the standards of Odyssey then, Bowser's Fury is great in that every collectable is focused, with 5 hanging around each lighthouse and a few others on islands that you use Plessie to explore to.

Bowser's Fury actually answers 2 other issues in a couple Nintendo games to. Another recent one Breath of the Wild's Bloodmoon mechanic. In that piece, after a significant amount of time passed, a cutscene would interrupt you and all the enemies would respawn with several strong enough near you chasing you. The issue with this mechanic was that there was no threat to it, at least not in the mid to late game, since you would be stocked up on pausable quick heal items, and it would be easy to simply outrun the enemies. Here, Bowser occurs during the 'night portion' as a legitimate threat. He has blocks fall from the sky near mario and will breath a sizable flame attack near the player that they have to find cover to avoid. On top of this, you can also ward off the Reptile's bile by collecting a catshine (the primary collectible) early thereby giving the player legitimate control over the desperation state and allowing them to do something that isn't just run away for a few minutes. At no point was I irritated with Bowser coming up to attack me, sometimes he would disrupt me from the shine I was trying to get, however Bowser himself is also nessecary to collect shines as well by baiting him to break blocks and running to spawning islands that show up during the night. I hope that the Zelda development team takes note of how this game handled the day/night cycle tension because it was honestly a mess in BotW and comparing it to this shows a night and day difference.

Aside from this, Plessie is also acts as a reply to the sailing mechanic in windwaker. Compared to a small sailboat, here you ride a large sea mammal that emits a hefty rumble on a jump giving a weight to the journey. They also make the travel time from one island to another proportionally significantly shorter than whatever you are trying to do on said island whereas Windwaker was oversatisfied with being sailing simulator for most of its runtime. One other way it prevents a feeling of tedium is making Plessie vital on her own terms for collecting around 20% of the possible shines. These factors all work to keep the player constantly in a satisfied relationship with the collectathon element while still keeping them engaged with the environment. You are on a satisfied unbroken pursuit from one place to the next. The only thing I wish Plessie had here is a small boost operator. None of the timer functions would have needed to be remanaged, a small boost would just let me 'feel' the animal actually moving faster whereas tilting the stick forward doesn't convey a great sense of a change in speed.

One interesting note here is that most of the movement is based around power up swapping. Your movement options like the long jump, triple jump, and backwards verticle jump are all still cramped or removes. While this wasnt particularly an issue in the linear level design of 3D World (Especially if you played as peach who had the raccoon suit power baked into her movekit), it does provide a small issue with the large sandbox playspace, instead you gain movement control through power up accumulation and management, being able to hold 5 of each power up and swap to them at will. For instance you climb the side of scaffolding with the Cat Powerup, swap to the Raccoon one, and then float over to the other piece of scaffolding. This mechanic works mostly well and its honestly way more appealing than trying to do the obnoxious hat combos jumps in Odyssey, and is more accessible in general, my only grievance here is that it renders the basic mushroom powerup redundant due to this accumulation, since all powerups make it a dead power up from random box hits and 100 coin level up drops. On that note, here I unveil once again my fundamental hatred with coins. I hate the constant bling sound on picking them up and they simply were not necessary to litter this playspace with. I might be one of the only people unironically annoyed and averse to the coins that isn't a no coins challenge runner but I must be honest in saying that if there is a way to avoid such redundancy its better off to do so.

Speaking of redundant, the 'theme' here is that everything is cat themed, cats sprawl all over non hostile spaces, cat power ups are used in the Giga Bowser fight, and cat ears appear from all the enemies you fight. The first two are fine, but the others push the experience too much into the realm of 'gimmick' or 'joke game' which doesn't really fit in with the pollution anxities and kaiju descalation neuroticism from Bowser Jr. While we are on the point of aesthetic presentation, the sludge effect looks great, especially with contemporary lighting and liquid physics effects, it drips and sputters out like an oil spill coming alive which is fantastic.

Spontaneous Critique on Cameras

What isn't great is the fact I have a sleepy camera for viewing it all. I believe that Mario 64 has actually the best camera in any 3D game I've played, which is a bold statement because most people dont really know how to use it and thus see it as a nuisance (which for me is part of the appeal to, I love having to fight with the camera sometimes in games its actually funny as hell to have Borne levels of confusing camera positions happen out of nowhere in the same way its funny when you long jump off a cliff when you meant to ground pound). To me, the Laikatu camera has so many functions in its favor that I could easily write a fluff piece about how it makes 64 a perfect game as its own, however to cut a long story short, there's a speed to which the camera will snap to the various fixed positions that isn't found in almost any 3D console game afterwards. Most 3D console platformers/action games have at least compensated the monopoly of this garbage 360 drone camera by making the speed for moving it reasonably fast (though not nearly fast enough imo). 3D world actually did bring back the fixed camera positions for the single player campaign, but made the positional change points slight and for the most part not tracking the player as they move forward. Most of the camerawork was semi isometric so I get why they couldn't port that over. However they could have at the very least made the camera more sensitive and move more quickly because stuff will attack you off screen and it will take a full 2 and a half seconds to reorient the visual space to figure out the confusion. This has been a problem in every Nintendo released 3D game since Mario Sunshine but at least Sunshine is kind of funny about it since Mario Sunshine has a wacky masocore energy to it in random bursts. The reason I'm highlighting it here then is that its the worst the camera has probably ever been for this. I was constantly getting annoyed in the Giga Bowser fights because the dude would roll off screen and I'd have to pan over forever to put him in view. This is simply an end point problem of what happens when you make games built around spectacle with contemporary graphics. For instance I would prefer that the sensitivity is increased, but this is a double bind, because with the graphical polish on display it would feel woozy and disorienting scrolling through that much information before settling the edge of the frame. I dont mind because I've played a lot of games, so I get why inexperienced players wouldn't enjoy that. With that said it's also a tacit point against staying in the realm of 3D graphical fidelity too long in general, because the issue ultimately becomes a problem of juggling visual business with the conveyance of context sensitive information.

I noticed for instance, in Resident Evil 4 Remaster that due to the visual business of the space, yellow paint effect is adorned to all the movable objects to convey context sensitivity. Meanwhile, the wacky camera controls in Metroid Prime Remaster were also stripped back due to the fact its 'antiquated' design comes in sharp contrast to an increase in visual business. The clear appeal is the market dominance of spectacle as immersion. I'm deeply opposed to it. Environmental detail is not that vital if it ambiguates control. Immersion comes through a sense of control or lack thereof, and through impassioned dialogue and interaction with other characters. A lot of modern 'polished' games offer a pretty environment for the expense of less control and clarity, and generally game environments have problems with letting characters speak for themselves. For instance here Bowser Jr. attempts a dialogue with Mario, and instead of letting that dialogue function on its own, an awkward disembodied narrator interprets what Bowser is saying to the player rather than letting the man speak for himself either through pictures alone or voice acting. You might be thinking 'so what?' well, I think the reason people have become too skiddish to letting characterization happen through imagery, body language animation, or various other non dialogue interactions is because people who play games for whatever reason seem to have trouble properly interpreting non dialogue interaction on their own. For instance Transparency made a strong argument in favor of the idea that people ragging on Balan Wonderland for the 'nonsensical story' were simply not paying attention and I would have to say I agree with her assessment. This is an ultimately sad state of affairs, I think its because people are afraid of the ambiguity in images but it creates another paradox. In modern gaming you have complex facial rotoscoping and detailed environments, both of which 'enhance' a raw interpretive ambiguity. Yet, instead of taking advantage of it games like Death Stranding and The Last of Us are obsessed with talking to you. In cutscenes, in the walk and talk, in dialogue boxes, etc. You can't share a stare or look at a painting. It's chatter until the day goes by. Instead of 'talking' this point to death I'll instead just vaguely gesture at Journey as a clear example of how non-verbal storytelling and non graphically 'real' space can be effective for immersion. Whether maximally so or not I leave up to your discretion.

Aside from these admittedly exaggerated complaints, I feel like what makes Bowser's Fury work in its favor in this format is its short runtime and compact open sandbox design. If the game was 3 times larger as some people are wistful about, a lot of what makes it work would begin to strain if it went on too long without being rehauled properly, all the moments I mentioned annoyed me are functionally footnote complaints to an otherwise solid experience. I recognize that such a difference is probably found in the fact most people who played this actually liked Odyssey as well when I find that one bland and flat.

CW: Global Warming, NFTs, Neoliberalism

Song Accompaniment

Played out of curiosity from Dan Olsen's latest video The Future is a Dead Mall which dedicates its entire runtime to a thorough analysis of it. Decentraland is an NFT focused social oriented MMORPG where the point is that you have to buy the land and assets through crypto. He does more justice to the abomination than I ever could, focusing primarily on its 'post scarcity' [economic model] (
https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxHTuFh2bVJvrHu8WUjl_WNfiOqDjgX-aU) and corrupted 'landlord moderators' style system of so called 'governance'.

Anybody who has either watched Olson's other videos on NFTs or Fortnite is already going to be well aware of the systems of commercial artifice, fragmented 'community building', and desperate ponzi delusions that underline a lot of these. To such an extent that the video itself might seem redundant especially after NFTs already had their big crashpoint recently. That's the thing though, this place is still alive and still functioning in 2023, crypto is not your typical product rugpull. It's a system of, I guess I would call, 'post nostalgia'. I saw on one mans plot all these billboards and banners of the bored ape yacht club and ETH and thought on the one hand the guy who put this all up may not have been on in a while, but on the other hand the people who believe in the future of this stuff have built such an insecure sense of identity out of advertising products that I wouldn't be surprised if it was built yesterday as a 'shrine' of how far they've come. We are coming into the era of advertisement as interactive experience. I teleported randomly into an event at one point where people were all talking on a zoom meeting about the value of Metaverse. Everyones avatar was just standing around as these blown up zoom conversation was displayed on the side. Afterwards, everyone was ushered inside and the worst fashion show/ball music started playing that I left.

Elsewhere the place is littered with these disturbing nouve riche ideas of immaculate sci fi casino spaces, bars, auction house etc usually empty of furniture with just PNG images on the wall. An important point here is that all of them had to have 1 wall open so that the camera doesnt freak out when you're inside meaning all the buildings feel less like buildings and more like Kiosks or Booths which is great because well, thats kinda what they are.

One really interesting point that leads into this feeling of haunted fragmentation is that the music is also a pay to use. So it will randomly play as an asset without fading in properly, often needing a moment to properly generate in, so you're always being startled by the worst house music you've heard. Along with that almost nobody is on and outside of prerecorded messages nobody talks 1 to 1 as avatars despite there being a voice chat button which gives everything a 'dead' quality to it. The space is absolutely gigantic so at best you'll find 1 person in a random area from teleport who is AFK, so its mostly just a museum of garbageart.

There's something inherently amusing about touring a space that isn't meant for you though, being able to gawk at unfinished architechture and the frantic aspirations backing them. That sense of hauntedness and fragmentation is usually referenced as a marker that something is 'bad' but I'm not so sure. Decentraland operates to me as such a unique attempt at upselling entertainment service as a possession product that to simply discard it and call it bad is to do it a minor disservice. The function of this feels like a tacit parody of all the other social MMOs that are less forthright about doing the same thing, it feels 'unreal' in spite of the fact these are real people operating and who bought all this stuff. For instance, the commodification of fashion attire in VR Chat and Second Life are equally as absurd. Along with the desire in a lot of more objective oriented MMOs like FF 15 explicitly trying to upsell you on the idea that if you buy the full version you can own your own house. These strange fauxscarcity trends are everywhere. Hell even discord nitro has it, there's no bandwidth being hurt by having animated gif emotes for unpaid users, its privatized only for the bottom line. It's worth noting then that Decentraland and its advocates are not just profiting off this, the sell value comes in imagining a future for which all their obnoxious advertising becomes justified. They are selling a future even if they don't implicitly believe in it.

Peter Fraise refers to the concept of the clash of abundance with hierarchies as 'Rentism'. He says that

"But an economy based on artificial scarcity is not only irrational, it is also dysfunctional. If everyone is constantly being forced to pay out money in licensing fees, then they need some way of earning money, and this generates a new problem. The fundamental dilemma of rentism is the problem of effective demand: that is, how to ensure that people are able to earn enough money to be able to pay the licensing fees on which private profit depends." link

The point here is that it's within this reference point of abundance that people are thinking. I really do think you see stuff like this in the crypto imagination because literally never is their concern on food or energy crises, they assume a utopian system in which these logistics are already taken care of. All that's left then for them is a series of entertainment identities to choose from. I don't find these people inherently ridiculous for this, after all is this not how we are generally trained to think? Cultural consumption under neoliberalism is bargaining constantly about which choice out of a line to vote for and what the new blockbuster movie is like. It's a constant pull of selling something now to ignore the larger issue, for example energy crises under global warming.

It's just that in order for this system of thinking to work, everything has to constantly be in a state of cultural trend adoption and abandonment. Nostalgia has to constantly be working faster and thus, reappeal these relics to somebody down the line. In order for it to work people have to change fortnite and roblox and only after a few years, rather than decades, get you to say 'remember old fortnite'?

In the same way people buy into the fiction of there being isolated news stories that only refer to local narratives of crime or devastation rather than any understanding of it coming out of environmental forces, class antagonisms, and the violence over resources, the adoption of fast fashion market identity experiences is a similar distraction technique. Countries see a world in which water becomes scarce, they are already fighting over it. People trapped into digital delusions don't think twice about it. They sell the idea that neoliberalism as a model of self pimping and privatization is actually going towards making everyone lives better as a whole, that there's more of an abundance of resources when in fact the opposite is true. The environment is decaying at a literally unsustainable rate and there's not enough abundance to keep up with that. They tell people that because having to make things out like problems are getting worse and that wars may be inevitable with the current system lead to uprisings. Countries and the people that lead them only believe in their own domination and territory, there's no dream of 'future' up there but they have to maintain the fantasy that there is regardless.

People who buy into the liberal reasoning of progress don't see it that way. In order to believe in the delusion that you can merge accumulation of physical into the digital entirely, you have to believe in these Thiel-esque forms of psychotic utopianism and immortalism. This is 'your' ladder to climb, and thus you don't have to settle on any preferences or identity, that there's almost more to consume. Just ignore death, we will fix that to, everything can last for which you can continue on this trend of fast fashion and control.

The world of Decentraland is sad, silly, and pathetic, but I'm glad I got to see it, because in my view it's the end states of merging your sense of self with the internet under neoliberalist notions of the future. There's an implicit understanding that you aren't meant to appreciate these 'sincere parodies' but I'm not so sure. The design of things in this world is fucked up in such a specific way that it would make for a rich inspiration point for almost any game dev out there. This stuff is trash but its the trash of an ideological monopoly worth reinterpreting. Until a revolutionary future truly takes force, we need stuff like this around, and for people like Dan Olson to put a microscope to it so we can see the larger world for the rotting machine that it is.

Accompaniment

The strong appeal of Pizza Tower style has already been spoken for. Its caught on like wildfire to the point of rampant fanaticism, friend of mine Appreciations articulates with a frenzy that

"I really think this game is one of the best indie games ever made and just like pizza in general, nobody dislikes all pizza. You will find something to enjoy here and odds are, you'll love it." Link

In more specific terms, Jenny accurately relates the appeal here to that of crass 90s cartoon animation.

"At its core, Pizza Tower is an ode to all that 90s stuff that I love. It's a bit ugly in style, but in that deliberate Ren & Stimpy or Ed, Edd n' Eddy kinda way, and I warmed up to it almost immediately." ending her sentiments with "At the end of the day, yeah this is really fucking good. Believe the hype, etc etc" link.

Along with this I've felt the sensibility of Pizza Tower's strong appraisal in a lot of the rest of my online life to be it social media use, internet discussions, algorithm content praising the game, streamers enjoying it, etc. The hype seems neverending, it's a shame though because after completing it with a 66% mark I feel entirely disconnected from this perspective. The title overall feels like all style and no substance. All cheese and no sauce.

There are so many glaring flaws with Pizza Tower's (2023) fundamental design in my view that it leaves me baffled nobody else has spoken for them yet. In order to vent my frustrations most effectively I want to first take a step back and say that even though people have been laudatory it would be false to say there has been no criticism about where it falls short. To turn back to Jenny and Appreciations for a moment they've both offered something in this regard. Appreciations mentions that the down attack is finnicky as sometimes it will input a swipe attack over a ground pound, and that they felt no motivation to go 100%. In a more controversial post ponders on bigoted jokes that the developer plays into highlighting his sense of offensive stereotype as a form of humor. Meanwhile, Jenny focuses more on hit detection and the deception of health, particularly for her in the case of bosses though I should say I experienced this outside of just boss fights as well.

While I could quibble on the ways in which these are accurate or not (the one on stereotypes for gags is especially accurate, unfortunately, you have the happy merchant grabbing you (semitic stereotype), and large 'crosseyed' baseball player that mistakes you for a ball (retardation visual stereotype) just to name two. However I want to shelf those concerns and focus on the issues I have with the design fundamentals.

Pizza Tower tries to use a 'ranking' formula of design to motivate player engagement, something that you might be familiar with from 3D sonic titles like Sonic Adventure (1998) or platinum action titles like Bayonetta (2009). The problem is this badge mastery system contrasts with the nessecity to check in nooks and crannies for secrets, thereby slowing you down and killing your combo. No matter what you do your first run of any level is probably going to be around a B at best because you'll be trying to comb for the 5 ingredients on every level, which are necessary to complete the story. The idea here is that in freeing them it works as a reward motivator, but due to the fact that they and the secrets are often tucked out from a linear runpath, even slightly, they instead become a collectible you have to remember and stop for. More to the point this combines with digging for secrets and 'poking' for an optimal route. Unlike the concise 1 minute platforming tests like Dustforce (2012) or Super Meat Boy (2010), Pizza Tower's levels go on for anywhere from 4 to 10 minutes. This sets in a sense of fatigue at individual level mastery where you have to try and fail constantly to get it precise. The problem is that there's no tangible reward for getting better at the individual levels besides an overall progression mark. If you 'P' a boss or a level the number percent goes up, but nothing cosmetic or informative happens as a result of doing well or poorly, there's no unlockable content as an extrinsic motivator. NPCs in the tower don't comment on your performances. No clothing options are unlocked. Peppino doesn't calm down or gain confidence. It's just an achievement for achievements sake.

This is an issue because the 5 off path collectable ingredients you have to catch arent as optional for completion as they first appear. In the beginning the threshold ratio between ingredients needed from each level to unlock a new floor is 50%, one might think based on that that you may need to pick up ingredients but not worry about them too much but you'd be wrong. By the end that percentage rises to a dramatic 90%. The issue is since there is 5 ingredients per level you have to find you actually have to be thorough on each level in finding them. Based on whether the player knows this going in or not makes a big difference because the end you're going to be forced to go back to levels you had skipped over or didn't get all the ingredients from.

Putting the ratio threshold for completion this high is frustrating because its easy to miss an occasional ingredient, and many of the levels themselves are frustrating. Once you get near the finish line the story is practically begging you to climb back down and finish it out a little more through this padding mechanic. End game backtracking is meant to play into that sense of nostalgia and wistfulness, 'I came this far and now look, I'm so much better'. However, because of the amount of gimmicks and gags per level there's not a fundamental sense of player improvement. What happens instead is just a fetch quest followed by, to be vague about the ending, an effusive celebration of itself 'remember this boss? remember this mechanic?' it's ultimately shallow though, because you unlock nothing from being good at the individual levels themselves. This creates a contradiction where you are rewarded for doing the bare minimum but almost not at all for exceeding expectations, as the range between both becomes smaller as the game goes on. The S and P ranks for non boss levels are functionally 'challenge runs' of the game, you're likely to get a B or better without even trying. So by the end all you end up feeling is that you know a few more mechanics. There's no sense of growth or player immersion.

Contrast this to another platformer like say Celeste (2018) where the window of player ability to complete the game is incredibly large. There's a wound rope of difficulty around optional yet visible cherries and toggle accessibility options. Celeste respects the players time by outlining that the Cherries serve no explicit function, they are a side challenge that implicitly build a sense of character for the player, focusing more on building its story elements instead. On the other hand then Pizza Tower deceives the player by telling the them the collectibles matter but not making it clear how much they do. By keeping the rewards of its goals ambiguous it relies on the player to feel that desire to explore its levels and master them. When the player finds out that they don't get anything for doing these side quests it taints future experience of play. When I restart playing Pizza Tower again I know despite all the stats and checklists thrown at me that only the ingredients matter. The secrets, rankings, and achievements are meaningless. However since they aren't treated that way, since they are conveyed as important visual stimuli it becomes a part of play that gets in the way rather than enhancing it. In Celeste the cherries don't mean anything besides knowing how much goes into the pie at the end, but since you were always told that and then the story keeps quiet about their inclusion for the entire run, you can adjust on a new playthrough how much or little you feel like caring about that.

This was really difficult to word properly but the end experience is that I felt like I was being needlessly graded and told to backtrack rather than feel a part of the world. Something needed to have changed in this system for me to feel comfortable, either:

1. Easier: The levels needed to be overall shorter in length so I could master them

2. Less Grading: Less visual information about how 'well im doing' needed to be conveyed to me

3. More Lore: The secrets and rankings needed to unlock cosmetic or lore content in the world for me to feel more immersed for doing well

4. Less Padding: The ratio of ingredients need to complete needed to be a stable reasonable threshold 50 - 75%, and the final level needed to be cut

5. Less Obfuscation: The eye secrets needed to be removed entirely so that I could focus less on 'combing' levels for extra points and more on actual execution

Without any of these taking place this experience has become 'style at all costs' which while amusing in moments becomes distressing as a design philosophy. It feels like a design philosophy chosen to keep the player playing as much as possible so you can see all it has to offer. As nice as it looks, it comes off as desperate and frustrating.

Less abstractly a few other miscellaneous issues

-Proximity score doesnt matter since its just about collecting as much as you can and keeping a chain, so the score should only show up at the end

-Camera needed to be zoomed out from the player a bit more because you end up just flailing at high speeds as it is

-If you turn the HUD off a -5 still ticks in the top left corner during the runback portion which is very distracting

-The bosses only test your postitioning and not your ability to execute running maneuvers which feels not in pace with the point of the game

-They put the best song in the tutorial, a catchy bass song with tons of fancy hi hat use, the other songs aren't half as good so they feel weaker. Probably just shouldn't have even used it because it makes everything feel disappointing

-The levels that kill you based on time have an unreasonably high completion threshold compared to end level runbacks, meaning you'll have to repeat them more than you would a normal stage

-there needs to be more discreet 'Grading thresholds' between A and S rank for non boss stages. S Rank forces a 2nd run through the level out of a player which borders on challenge mode feeling. Adding a couple more ranks around this point in the scale would do a lot to implicitly reward the player for doing better.

-The happy merchant bit in the Slums really bummed me out, like what the fuck man

I want to end on one last note. Appreciations nailed one thing I agree on, they noted that "You've got yourself a winner in Pizza Tower and that winner here is adrenaline." My qualm is that rewarding adrenalinic high intensity action response puts a person in a more impulse driven mode. I'm not sure that mode is 'good'. Anecdotally, this specific form of adrenaline puts me in a state of frustrated anger once I start to feel like I cant do better or the game is fucking with me. That anger boils me up and tends to make me dysphoric as a result. I'm not sure how much this applies to other people but I'm not too convinced that rewarding a surplus adrenaline hormones on tap like this from titles like Sekiro or Pizza Tower etc is actually good for us? It certainly isnt good for me, that's why I tend to play 'non difficult' story focused titles. I've noticed people say I'm not trying hard enough, but I wonder especially looking at how social media rewards impulsive thinking if its possible people have it backwards. Maybe everyone else is trying too hard to get that spike, and telling me I need to, as well.

Look, I'm not saying that it's healthy I respond to action input with the rage I do by any means, but I'm far from the only rage gamer. Like, I've never seen somebody rage quit a visual novel for example. It's always the people fucking up in rhythm games breaking stuff, its always the League mates freaking the fuck out about not having place down a ward etc. It's never the Final Fantasy nerds having fits. Again these are all anecdotes but its just food for thought. At the very least it explains my preference against it and why I tend to be so critical of finding design harmony in it.

Song Accompaniment

mil rosas (2021) is an autofiction about Gaby fighting cancer while her family pop in and out to offer words of support. Meanwhile she is playing through as one of the sisters put a 'very boring' fetchquest part of an RPG game on her GBA. The player is tasked with completing this fetchquest while the family pops in to say hi at triggered points in the journey basically interrupting the 'action' of walking and talking with visual novel esque dialogue the that you have to look up from the screen and nod about.

I put emphasis on explaining this because it is to my mind a completely unique set up for a more narrative driven 'story within a story' video play, its worth checking out for that reason alone. I also think given the story is touching on an aspect of disability and illness that is actually ignored, that being a marked lack of mobility and desire to locomote regardless. This double narrative works immensely well and conveying the sense of stasis and isolation that accompanies such a struggle.

The play doesn't settle with just stopping here though. It does something a bit bold and shreds away the conventions of proper names attached to any of the speaking characters whether in the GBA or the IRL characters. This obviously marks as a form of confusion for the player, but it also forces them to pick up the IRL story through context clues. After all we don't walk around outside of work with name badges attached to us so it makes sense not to do so. Along with this the action button, usually used to pull all of the text on screen, here it just skips to the next line instead. So you have to wait for all of it to scroll on screen before hitting the action button. These two factors work in tandem to 'slow down' the normal pace of play, it also makes narrative sense the couple times you make this mistake because one of the psychological effects of chemotherapy is fogginess so it makes sense you would mess up. This whole mediation on health and family works phenomenally well.

My favorite factor that the narrative so elegantly teases at is the idea that handheld consoles have a specific unique quality in their focal experience that elevates them as anxiety suppression devices. A lot of us are used to the concept of sitting down and playing a video game on giant monitors or huge pieces of hardware. This is all fine and well, but it can shred away the appeal of having something in between your hands to mess around with on a trip or as a way to relax between social moments. Handhelds perform a similar function that light novels and magazines do. One of the earliest Nintendo success stories that caused them to pivot was the Game and Watch series which was literally a cheap digital clock with a bit of arcade gameplay for business men to pass the time on the train. The technology has expanded many times over since then allowing for more complex actions and narratives, that's the value mil rosas touches on. The imagined town and delivery situation is a bit more broody than people might initially expect from a top down GBA game, but I really like that idea of a serious and slightly gothic hand held adventure. To this effect how occasionally sassy and poetic the GBA dialogue is works for me, and makes me yearn to play these sorts of hand held titles over the more breezy titles associated with it. My guess is that this distinction in style is due in part to the spanish cultural background. There's rose beads and, going off the name of the work, it was written primarily with a spanish culture and background in mind. So that's likely where the gothic flair is coming from, which I can appreciate.

There are some thorns to this flower though. I mentioned earlier that I liked the dialogue design but I have some caveats: The fact that it functions equally in both the game and IRL the same seems awkward to me. For one I think the GBA characters having names when they talk would have made sense since that's a notable convention worth some parody on. More specifically though the pace and function of both dialogues operating and scrolling the same reveals an issue of narrative monotony. These two realms should operate distinctively because the whole point is that the Handheld is a form of escape. On top of this, the rather dreadful song adds a lot to the piece but doesn't change or stop when you enter or exit a room. Real missed opportunity for immersion here. That being said an argument could be made that the music is not actually playing from within the GBA, that its just an auditory hallucination or non diagetic accompaniment. If this is the case, it does improve the sense of monotony and dread but even here I think it should have lightened up or changed as the story went along from the initial sense of disorientation since its indicated within the plot much the same idea.

With that said this is a really unique and profound reflection far worth giving a shot. Especially in terms of the spatial nostalgia during illness makes it absolutely worth giving a try!

P.S. I recognize that assessing the 'value' and formal reflection on an autofiction may come off as rude or meanspirited. I notice that a lot of people get too shy when talking about the formal qualities of a 'personal' work. I think this can do a disservice to the art form though. Almost all poems are about grief, trauma, or personal love but we take no mind in analyzing poetry and form. Poets usually don't get hostile against poetic analysis of their very personal poems. I think if we really want to develop our minds and engagement with this medium its worth assessing what even the most personal works did and where they may have faltered. In particular the way critics seem to treat criticizing very personal videoplays as if you're battering somebodies brainchild reveals a quite false assumption that art cant be personal if its made by more than a half dozen people. All art has the element of 'personal' in it, and to assume we should hold back our thoughts on assumptions of how personal something is I think misses the point of good criticism in being agnostic to this fact entirely. No I think the reason people jump to this idea that its 'too personal to criticize' is out of a veiled sense of embarrassment of experiencing (and often enjoying) something outside the bounds of what they are 'supposed' to. Stop being so shy then! People love to know about the obscure. Just food for thought.

Loadout change current trashed space. Tense discussions at the periphery hiding and seeking ballistic confectioneries. Combat. Combat droned crimson standoffs accelerate slaughter quick ziptied carefully.

Good boy.

Phone language carrier capacity broken torque dead ended demands. Castled sanity envelope firing squads. Manifesting a; late on rent early on work to rise noise gated communities. Implore once twice three trimes not even sniff up the powder down mauve cocktails try trye against. Reset undeath worship screaming gun sound affected glands of despair over producing. Experiments in pentagrammatical style but dont chew your food: regurgitate it. Still life in vitro clamoring. Diagnosed with character syndrome its charred. Pitch: Can do anything you pleased. Puh. Pee. Pitch: You're the master of your destiny. Purpet Pi- Strikeout: Decieted fucking moron. When in doubt crater your health away for a chance. Climbinginginging ladders fallinged over hog resources pork yourself alive just for a chance. gunked up, get pick sale choose a Quest desire for the whole load right on your face doctored glow.

Good boy.

Devastate the land its your oyster shuck it makes no difference oxygen for nobody steal your heart upsell it to the highest bitter choose life thats obvious choose reliving thats blunt carve your own turkey steal from the fand that heeds lookie there in the sun a happy contract scorch earth with flavor now 'Pitch:' thats what youre supposed to do buy borrow die ad infinitum. Man radiodated break down splice dials through the azure blastwave exit. Emptied lilac tongues were made for cutting no backstory only present belly for you. Futures' market twisting fun percent getting rocks off exchanging pleasures downstream. Die roll natural funny terse queries easy win instant found footage diagrammed explanations 'its like this' they say. Grooped dangstalkers of reason keep upcharging larval intents. Thrall applauds turns and say 'Youve been a naughty boy' stay hermetical cause zilch want that expense so drop it already.

Good boy!

Song

When I had initially played Blasphemous (2019) I had thought it was incredible. Mainly the reason why I had thought this was due to what it most clearly mimicked from the Souls series. Most particularly a checkpoint system and echoing audio design during voiced dialogue. I still believe that Blasphemous is really good, and I don't particularly mind its lack of mechanical iteration in the way others do. What it seems to lack in tight level design for example is made up with from its other more artistic iterations. In particular its application of spanish folklore into the realm of the religious gothic with grace. This guy goes into that more if you're interesed but for me, the flamenco nuevo soundtrack makes it all worth it alone. I can excuse a lot of mechanical flubs if the art and sound is good, so for a long time I had hyped this up in my head as an ignored masterpiece.

Sadly though Blasphemous is not a masterpiece, it's just good. I have a couple really weird arguments for why this is the case. However before we really get into that, you will have to accept some terms and conditions first. Similar to my Tunic and Hollow Knight write ups, I will be taking this and blatantly drawing comparisons to FromSoft's souls design. I know that on first blush such a comparison may seem tedious and I agree that in many cases it is. I hate the term souls-like more than anybody because of how constraining it is. Simultaneously, though, Hollow Knight actually feels great to play in part because how derivative it is as a souls title in terms of its design space. At some point we have to admit to ourselves that one of the reasons why Dark Souls (2011) feels as refreshing as it is, is because of its smart mechanical design decisions that push against the player. Dark Souls and to a lesser extent Demons Souls (2009) introduced through experimentation design decisions that simply make sense. For example autosaving, checkpoint systems, stamina systems, currency on death, etc. These all introduce friction to a player probably used to save scumming and throwing lives away at a problem without risk. So that's why everyone is obsessed with it and why comparisons are drawn. These elements and how they play together function as 'mechanically rich' design that constantly tests the player.

Every action based title probably should be considering the design of the Souls titles at some stage of development because its sensible design. That being said, I don't think that these elements should lock a title that is deriving from them to a sensibility of being derivative because everything derives off of good design from before. It's why I prefer the term 'search action' over 'metroidvania', its good to find the common denominator in my view rather than constraining the future of design in a medium to its past.

With all that said blasphemous and Hollow Knight are actually more derivative of the souls titles in particular in a few nuanced ways that deserve that point of comparison. Most notably hidden 'good endings' through obscure actions the player has to follow. A point of discretion that many of the Souls games involve in and that Hollow Knight, Tunic, and blasphemous follow in stride. Along with weird ways of shrouding its content through esoteric access points. For example the DLC content of Wounds of Eventide for blasphemous and Godmaster for Hollow Knight are both performed through strange and easy to miss access points that are nested away. There's no beating around the bush with this, this esoteric design is something I'm not particularly fond of and I think these titles need to cut this shit out.

For what it's worth I like when it's done for characters having them move about and being able to miss their sidequests that's all fine. It's legitimately cool that I had thought for example Petrus from Dark Souls was a cool dude for literally years, because I didn't know about his sidequest and its implications that he's a terrible rapist. I think this can add an extra allure to a story that justifies its position in the medium of 'videogames' because it makes sense that being able to hide secrets and offpaths through discovery is something this medium naturally can take advantage of. So I understand the appeal there. I don't think the novelty of hiding special good endings through weird actions is great though. blaphemous has an ending accessible through breaking the healing statues but theres nothing to indicate that they were breakable. These design decisions don't need to be imitated or used because instead of making the player feel like they 'found' something they are instead just obscuring content which will be unimmersive because it's going to be found through a walk through. It's not actually testing the player its just a marketing gimmick. Yes it 'feels cool' but its genuinely unsatisfying in retrospect. By comparison anybody who knows Cruelty Squad (2021) probably knows how obscure some of the endings and content is. I wont spoil it but Cruelty Squad is justifiable for this because if you replay the levels and talk to the NPCs they actually do tip you off about it, the aspect resolution reveal is a great example of this. Even aside from that though none of Cruelty Squad's secrets feel tidy. They feel disturbing, which in my mind is how secrets typically should feel. Portal has the ratman secret, a secret so great and so disturbing that it has become an iconic point for appreciating it fully. There's something to be said about secrets as a form of disturbing the player rather than rewarding them, something that Cruelty Squad has so successfully realized that I genuinely hope people obsess over the design of that title soon before people just forget about it. Along with this, Cruelty Squad also suceeds through not making its endings typically triumphant, I won't say more than that because of spoilers but this sensibility of rewarding players with the groteque is an important element. By comparison the endings for Tunic, blasphemous, and Hollow Knight are binaries. Either 'you didnt do enough, play again' or 'you did it, you found everything'. Do I really need to explain why this sucks? Let's move on.

The other place blasphemous flails is when it ironically doesn't derive enough from the frictional design of Souls. Some of them are obvious I think. blasphemous doesn't have a currency on death system you lose no tears in it when you die, probably because of its tree progression system of leveling. In order for the tree progression system to work you'd need to not punish the player via that risk system. However that risk system is there to stop players from simply throwing bodies away. All you have here is a minor diminishment of the mana bar when can be fixed so easily as to trivialize them. Small aspects like this I imagine these developers don't want to borrow from because of that fear of being derivative but yeah I think that not only should designers shamelessly borrow from them they should realize why they are even there in the first place.

There are more nuanced examples of this to. For example in contrast to the esoteric access point system, which everyone seems to like but secretly sucks. There is an inverse: A system everyone claims to hate but is secretly pretty good. That system is the boss runback. Dark Souls does not present a bonfire right before its bosses where blasphemous does. Now on paper that should mean that blasphemous made the better design decision right? You allow the player to do the challenge they want to do, you don't mess with them with a tedious run through to the boss allowing them to focus. This misunderstands the point though, Dark Souls has these runbacks both for immersion and to keep the player on their feet. I'm legitimate when I say that one of the reason Orstien and Smough is an iconic fight is because you do have to navigate and run past those giant enemies on the way in. People forget this part obviously, but Orstien and Smough would feel like a different fight if the bonfire was right next to the fog door. Elden Ring on the other hand takes this 'straight to the boss' approach via the Miraka statues, and if you ask me I think it makes the experience a little more lame. Feeling a small thrill of being chased and distanced from the action reminds the player to prepare and creates just that extra bit of friction making the issue of 'losing' have a bit of impact. If you lose against the boss this run up is your punishment. To me as long as there's some enemies chasing you that you have to navigate in the run up this is a good design decision.

Boss run backs are one of those aspects that nobody wants to defend and I wont warp this whole post into a defense of boss run backs aside from what I already said. However the point of this illustration is that there are nuanced design decisions like this everywhere that due to consumer pressure is often removed. People only vocalize hating these aspects of design. Saying things like 'X old game would be better without a loading screen' or 'fuck live systems they just artificially make the game longer' but I think extrinsic frictions like this are actually a motivator and a title that extra character. In retrospect we always want these frictions to not exist in part because of how memory and replay actually function. Nobody is consciously thinking about the Loading screen or fetch quests, we 'fast forward' our minds to these cool moments and as we age and our time becomes more precious we want games themselves to 'fast forwards' as well. Part of the reason for this is quite depressing: Even without the Hedonic Treadmill involved, playing Megaman as a kid and as an adult are functionally different due to both the abundance of other titles and our relationship to leisure. If other games exist that have no loading screens, why the hell would I play one that does? Not to mention that even in terms of enjoyment, games that get too frictional actually can alienate because you simply aren't being dripfed the amount of joy you are used to. Developer wise, there are a couple work arounds here, two that come to mind are either just ignoring that alienation and slapping 'retro' or 'masocore' on the title, or making the frictions only very slight (I choose the O&S souls example on purpose here since it's the easiest run back in the game). However, its not so simple from a critical consumption side because we have to say stuff beyond just pure enjoyment. I am maybe one of the only people that defends a static load screen and want to see it, because to even promote this idea is patently absurd. However its not that functionally different from what the risk of a currency on death system does. They are both Systems that slow down the player.

To turn back finally to blasphemous I'm not saying that its actually bad. It's a great experience to 'feel' again for its best boss fights through listening to the soundtrack, and generally its a fantastic experience from the audiovisual direction. It's just that it doesn't 'stick'. To paraphrase friend Femboygenius said that Cruelty Squad, something that only came out 2 years ago, is one of the only 2 games worth playing. Obviously this is a take meant mainly to enrage but I do think its interesting. FemboyGenius' favourite games all are from the past 10 years, and really stick to frictional design which means it's not an issue of something needing to be a 'classic' or not, just need to obey the principle of frictional design. I agree entirely that Cruelty Squad is probably one of the best fast FPS shooters since DOOM (1993). The reason I think this is because I have a similar flavor for so called 'masochistic' design, design that is constantly testing me to make those standout experiences matter. blasphemous and Elden Ring are both great audio visual experiences and to a certain extent this is enough. However there is something to be said about the aspect of what makes something iconic and really stand out, and that's putting obstacles in the way of the player rather than servicing them, Winnie the Pooh's Home Run Derby for example is a browser meme classic because startled players with its difficulty, this is what everyone remembers when the dust settles.

The good will please us, the great will test us.