If I had to describe 3rd strike in one word that would be "freedom". The game gives players a plethora of options in any situation. This is by design and has been discussed by Shinichiro Obata [1]: the game is built around "unanswerables" - the idea of creating situations with no clear answers/solutions/resolutions. This is done in order to avoid gameplay based around preset knowledge of situations, and instead emphasizes RPS mechanics more than other games in the genre. But how is this achieved in the game and what are its consequences?


The key to achieving such freedom is the heavy reliance on universal mechanics. The parry is an obvious example of this, along with mechanics such as the throw protection after blockstun/wakeup, crouch teching (also the extra damage done to crouching opponents). With the existence of those few mechanics, the player has plenty of tools at their disposal, that are universal across characters. There are no situations where the pool of answers is severely limited. Additionally, while some options cover a broader range of actions, the game always has a way to reward guessing the exact action that the other player will take. Because of this, every single decision carries risk and nothing is truly safe. Blocking is still the "safest" option, but it can be opened up by overheads into confirms and command grabs for reasonable damage. If that is not in a character's toolkit, then the simple throw loop in the corner can force out a reaction other than blocking. All of this contributes to creating an extremely unpredictable playstyle. Habits and predictable play can be punished severely, resulting in a game that promotes more attentive play and non-rigid playstyles.


Let's take a look at a practical situation in which those tools come into play. Dudley is a character with a strong 50/50 of an overhead or a low hit confirms that could lead to yet another 50/50 each time it is successful. If it is blocked correctly it leads back to neutral. In most other fighting games, without considering reversals (which still exist in 3S), this would be a situation where Dudley can use his absurd okizeme to play in a highly beneficial position. However, since this is 3S the opponent can always go for the parry instead. If successful it would give the defender a very strong combo in retaliation and more pressure afterwards as well. This turns the 50/50 into a double-edged sword. Yet while parrying is strong it still has its own counters - throws, delayed meaties, normals into cancels. In turn these have their own counters. The key takeaway is that, starting from 2 options (and potentially a throw sometimes), that would be the most efficient in most other fighting games, we get to create a variety of new options both sides have to consider and can use viably.


It is important to mention that those tools also limit the theoretical knowledge needed to play the game. While there is knowledge that could benefit a player, any situation provides enough information by itself for its resolution (answer). While frame data has its usage, it takes a backseat to elements like the pushback and ways in which an attack can be parried (low/high or both). Both of those elements can be deduced from the visuals alone. Even if it is a player's turn/a player has priority/advantage, the threat of a parry can steal that turn. This can be used both to escape pressure situations from frame traps or to even further your own pressure - the parry is a tool that can be used both defensively and offensively. Character specific tools still have their play, but rather than limiting or completely substituting your universal options, they tend to instead give you completely new options and create new situations.


All of it leads to some of the most unpredictable matches that one can find in the genre, while also being reasonably easy to play. It does require knowledge of those universal mechanics, but while more specific knowledge is helpful, it is often not required.


[1] If you want to read it for yourself I recommend the SF3 an oral history feature from polygon, the topic in question is discussed in the final bit of the interview.

Find it so deeply endearing that this work marred in technical limitations and an altogether rushed-ish structure is The Greatest love letter to a very genwunner philosophy, ALL without feeling egregious or pining for nostalgia. Game Freak despite everything loves its fans who can realistically Never Be Happy and makes that practically explicit from sunrise to sunset, and folds that into something new and altogether hopeful for a brighter future and earnest contextualization of its past.

Not tooo strong of one though, at least for me. Character writing is certainly the best here (or at least, toe to toe with Sun and Moon for me), especially from a moment to moment lens. Finale speaks volumes in its own way there, all so personable and defined and really have weight, presence, beautiful relations and chatter. But it also feels far too hesitant to break free of its limitations and that ends up being probably the most annoying part. Legendaries tend to be metaphorical or stand-ins for wide-spreading things in the series but this REALLY is the most "you just couldn't be serious about a heart to heart to be personable with a Pokemon huh." Still for what it's worth it swings as hard as Black/White and Sun/Moon do, just lacks the wherewithal structurally and in execution to get as high as they do. But it is nice to see people gas this up as their "finest hour" because it's not like it's wholly undeserving of that.

Mechanically it's like, we're taking our Legends Arceus prototype open world map (and bits of it structurally) and making it a Red/Blue + If It Was On Unreal Engine. Or in other words, very LARGELY hands off explore at your own pace open world and take in all the fights and sights and feel your journey of ADVENTURE, while having to reel-in that other than a couple cities the "expanse" is rather,,, illusory haha. I remember first touching this and LOSING it at how absolutely amazing the big hub town area is. I even took the classes, I was so into it all. Granted, high off an edible, but that expectation solidified, it felt so good. Unfortunately, literally nothing else in the game's areas capture or get even close to that, bar maybe the last one (which is kind of cheating really).

It is however also the comfiest Pokemon game to date. Extremely relaxing, potent quality of life implementation from top to bottom. Not a single hour feels even a bit wasted or as grindy as anyone's worst memories with this franchise. So easy to pick up and settle in, get cozy with seeing all of what's on offer here...
And as turbo-niche as talking about this game's difficulty may be, I do like how generally designed the leveling curve and fights are too. A couple were super tough checks for me even! Granted it was cuz i built my team a little awfully haha... all of them were Physical hitters ;w; Certainly some "wow that's funny" moments that feel both charming and, well, naturally hilarious. They gave one of the most important fights a literal ace-in-the-hole pokemon build that's INSTEAD sent out close to the start, while making their actual ace-in-the-hole a pokemon that's a SET-UP DESTROYER. Amazing. Well done.

I will say I find myself a bit more smarmy, sarcastic here, mostly cuz things have been hard and I sortttt of lightly pushed through with too much fervor just so a good friend of mine could get their birthday Suicune Raid present. Also cuz this gets a little too gassed up I feel >.> Not from a bad place tho! And who cares what I think there really!!! I'm glad people are having so much fun!!

Still, gives some to chew on, which puts this on an upper echelon for monster collectors in general. I think if you've been away from this series for feeling completely left out of the hyperlinear storyblook palooza, definitely give this a shot. It really is up there with the best Pokemon's put out.

PMD2 still sweeps tho

General mix of nausea trying to see this on its own terms versus what the series means for me. I'm moreso feeling to judge towards the latter considering that the game is seeking to be more replacing than going in its own direction, albeit you can still buy the first game on any market for cheap, it's not that sunset, so maybe that's a little mean?

Regardless though, I got about to chapter 5 before I stopped. Then got increasingly upset about it. Positives first it's like, a more competent horror in terms of visual design and understanding of its gore and shock. Genuinely better at pacing its atmosphere than the original, which is something I didn't think I'd find myself saying. I think a lot of that is simply by the original's design, as they couldn't get as visceral with the lighting or do most of the effects presented here, and said lighting back then in gen 7 now looks significantly aged worse even within its context. Dead Space 2 sidelines this entirely by going for a way better fusion with its pocket city meets infection, but still, credit where it's due the devs here's very clearly first project with a game of this kind of tone is firing very well here.

Everything ends there though. The big massive elephant in the room is how Dead Space Remake plays. I think it'd be really really silly to not acknowledge that Dead Space by Clear Intent explicitly and by result is influenced by Resident Evil 4. The OG and especially Dead Space 2 took this influence to give incredibly threatening enemies that were built around a toolset you had properly balanced to deal with them. You manipulated their enemy state between terrifying rush mode and kiting them together so you can get shots in while faster and more difficult incarnations came around the corner later. This significantly added to that horror, the necromorphs were very much abominations that gruesomely formed from humanity and their feral instinctual power that you had to manage and keep your distance especially with their erraticism was The defining factor.

But here? They're entirely defanged. This is utterly indefensible to me. The AI for lack of a better word is total dogshit. They'll constantly, CONSISTENTLY, revert to an idle state both after sprinting or even in the middle of attacks. They're boring, reduced in a manner similar to xenomorphs from Alien to Aliens, their threat deorbited to be replaced by, well, nothing. You're far more powerful too, weapon hitboxes have been so overtuned to where flamethrower just disintegrates now, as an example. Your stomp hitbox is so laughably huge that it brought me out of the game hard. I went through the entirety of chapter 4 trying to see how much I could get by just stomping enemies to death. I succeeded and that was depressing. I'm playing this game on Hard btw, and I've actually never been quite able to power through the original's hardest difficulties. I'm not that good at Dead Space. This remake really is just that toothless.

And that's astonishing to me. This is a remake set to be a powerful recognizable spirit of the original, with an uncharitable doctrine towards its coming entirely because EA still absolutely sunset the original devs with prejudice. But its roots, they're gone! They're not even a part of the equation here. I found playing this less interesting and engaging from a mechanical standpoint than Dead Space 3 and that in of itself is also something I never wished I had to say.

I don't know. On its own terms, I think it's largely understandable that people are seeing this from a nu-standpoint where they, likely honestly, never played the original. Simply observed it from its marketing and its dominating horror appeal and came in hoping to be blown away by that part of things. Which is there. That part is not, like, missing. This is in some sense a strongly competent horror walking sim of sorts (yeah i know, levels are still nonlinear, you still kind of fight things, but it's obviously not the point anymore). Difficult for me to internalize that though. The legacy I loved the series for is gone. I'm not very good with horror games exclusively, I loved Dead Space largely for how its monsters were analogous to the horror and forced me to feel things intrinsically through gameplay. I loved that something something ludonarrative. I liked the power and actualization of accomplishing past these terrible monsters, going through with wounds and scars and feeling like I really just lived through a stone cold hell.

Not here though. Dead Space has moved on. Maybe we should too.

I think what generally strikes me first about Ruina, when reflecting, is scale and balance. Most of it comes from sheer awe, jumping from LobCorp this whole work has a stark amount of awareness of the ramifications of LobCorp, while also choosing to make an ambitious goal to balance so so so much more on top. And yet, the scales do not tip over, the further I mulled over and dived into things, the more everything seems awfully well set. Lot of flowery words to say that Project Moon has read a significant amount of literature between games and has an incredible amount more to say AND manages to integrate it perfectly, stretching my use of the word 'ludonarrative' to its absolute limit.

Ruina runs out the gate dismantling the 'hero' of the prior story, burning its idea of redemption into beautiful flame before trying to work beyond him. It keeps the hands of librarians that followed him, resolute in their ways, alongside villains seeking vengeance, joining together against the systems that have confined them, constructing a tower of babel built upon lives hoisted out of the city, justified in the name of 'fairness'. Watch along with them as the city moves in clockwork, these gears set by hypercapitalist systems that turn along people until they are crushed under the metal and spat out as ground together puppets. Reprieve only in the hopes of the little bits of light that people cling to to try to change, sometimes ending up with distorted selves trying desperately to conduct their own symphony, until all of us self realize, progressing beyond the means by which defines human, gender, creed into something more. Full Self-Actualization, Manifestation, capture your E.G.O. to build your future.

It's all explored in intense clashes! Use cards you pull from the light you take, then spread them out into tactics that run an intense ebb and flow on the battlefield. As you stack the shelves with every story you face and people you brutalize, the potential of your use of this knowledge flies sky-high, until you've made 'decks' that swallow the next set of fights with pinpoint precision. Even if you were a master deckbuilder you still have to adapt though. Solve the puzzle that matches each new patron's pscyhe, or be forced to retool from the pushed over house of cards. Every level jump in reputation brings in a whole area of complexity that gives you more immense freedom, with the caveat that the game pulls not a single punch for you to learn it. You'll be walled over and over until fundamentals are rock solid, pushed into an understanding of the ways of the city.

The leftover roots of the corporation that stand in ashes beneath the spine of the library throw you into even stronger, more complex puzzles, boss fights that adopt the abnormalities' story directly into turn by turn gameplay. Then reaching further, becoming thorough contextualization for the characters, then RE contextualizing across central theming. The Kabbalah's Sephirot and christian allegory returns with a much more complicated and personal base that transcends the story into touching on the baseline recognition of compassion and empathy, down to fighting anthromorphized struggles. Finish off by fighting demonic reflections of each lesson you've learned, until you're once again back at the base of the light, trying to look upon that all too familiar completely hopeless massive scope of depressing systems that oppress life, and going, This Can Change. Even those with the darkest masks over them can decide to break the cycle and seek to dismantle the machine. We can keep going while everything around us is 'distorted', and

Become Star of the City, Facing the Past, and Building the Future.

The journey's a long one but not one step is misplaced, not a moment wasted. You might have cause to grind to backfill your mistakes but the progression is always continuous. If you've got the head for it, you might even break it faster under your feet. The City is not without its weaknesses, after all!

But really, this is a rocketing experience, practically irreplaceable after much time to think over it. If you're not at least considering getting it what are you doing hereeee.

A supreme victory! Housemarque and twin-stick shooter genre pioneer Eugene Jarvis team up to create what might very well be the best twin-stick shooter to date.

One of Nex Machina’s strongest points is the immense variety in its room/enemy design. Rooms are not mere square boxes á la Robotron 2048, they can take on all kinds of shapes and paths of progression. This can range from winding linear stretches to ring formations, to dense rooms populated with (in)destructible geometry, to half-circles with enemies in the middle, to certain platforms being locked off until you destroy specific enemies, to the standard squares where enemies spawn all around you, to even a chase sequence where you’re being chased by a massive rolling boulder.

The variety in enemy design is just as amazing. Enemies can impede you directly or indirectly, by directly chasing/aiming towards you, aimlessly moving around the stage/covering the stage with bullets or lasers in a straight line or a sweep, and/or spawn bullets/enemies around them on death or kamikaze towards you. All archetypes can come in high-HP variants which demand more commitment to dispatch than others. Some turrets are invincible, which means that at times you just have to deal a sweeping laser across the entire stage. Then there’s all the enemy types related to scoring, which requires its own separate section to explain. Nex Machina makes all these enemies work by staggering enemy spawns behind intervals or certain triggers, while also pre-spawning in several enemies. This way the player has the breathing room to take in their surroundings and form a plan of action, but it also allows Nex Machina to recontextualize the same areas by simply spawning certain waves of enemies in certain positions.

While there might have been room for more complex stage hazards or enemies, one should consider that Nex Machina’s non-stop arcade pacing and “easy to pick-up” nature wouldn’t work as well with gameplay elements that aren’t immediately understandable. All new elements that Nex Machina does introduce rarely deviate from the basic “shoot everything to move on to the next area” setup. Sometimes your progress in an area is locked until you destroy a new enemy type (so you can get a better look at what it does), or they’re introduced gradually alongside previous elements in areas that lower the intensity a bit. Either way, both approaches allow beginning players to properly get eased into the systems, while returning players can simply speedrun through and remain engaged because of the scoring system.

Nex Machina’s core and stand-out mechanic has to be its dashing. These grant total invincibility, can be chained up to three times, let you shoot while dashing, and have a (relatively) noticeable recharge time once fully depleted. On this own this isn’t a terribly interesting system, but what makes it stand out is the Dash Explosion. Namely, each dash generates a small lasting explosion that can instagib any non-boss enemy and cancel any nearby projectiles. Enemies that will otherwise take a massive beating before going down can be deleted in a second if you simply dash into them. This is especially useful against enemies that spawn smaller enemies on death, since the lasting property of the explosion means that all its offspring and revenge bullets will also be immediately deleted. And even against bosses it remains useful by being able to dash in and out of bosses for extra damage. So dashing in Nex Machina has not just a defensive, but an offensive usage as well. Playing aggressive means phasing through bullets and enemies while one-shotting high-HP targets, and then getting out to safety as you spend your last dash charge.

While triple dashes + dash explosions make dashing immensely powerful, it remains balanced because of how crowded the stages can get with enemies, bullets, and lasers. The small AoE of the explosions means that dash explosions cannot reliably clear out entire crowds of popcorn enemies, and thus shouldn’t be used for that purpose. In larger rooms there can be a significant amount of distance between you and a high-priority target with bullets/enemies between, so spending several dashes just to gib that enemy can leave you in a terrible position with no leftover dashes and no hope of survival. Sweeping/aimed lasers, expanding energy circles, and dense bullet vomit regularly force you to dash at the right angles and moments, so you cannot always mindlessly spend all your dashes on offense. What’s more, in the later stages Nex Machina throws another curveball by having certain enemies fire distorted lasers, which cannot be dashed through at all! All these combined makes dashing a versatile yet situational tool that can be used creatively but must be used intelligently.

What makes Nex Machina really gel even across many replays is its highly optimizable scoring system. Each area not only keeps you occupied with a legion of baddies to shoot, but multiple layers of scoring objectives. The main one is ‘human chaining’, where you get more points the more humans you chain (a bonus which maxes out when having chained 20 humans). Here it’s not about grabbing all humans as fast as possible, but rather spacing out the rate at which you grab them so that your chain meter won’t go empty before you clear the area. This is then complicated by tankier enemy types that will try to capture your humans if left unattended for too long, making you prioritize either taking down those enemies or simply grabbing the humans right before they’re captured. The second major part of the scoring system is the multiplier, which multiplies the score you get from everything (Including humans) and is raised by killing enemies or finding multiplier tokens. Because the multiplier is global, you want to prioritize raising it and picking-up multiplier tokens where possible before picking up humans, which can be tricky given that your human chain meter depletes within six seconds. Some areas even come with pre-placed multiplier tokens (extra life spawns turn into multiplier tokens if you have the max. amount of extra lives, and some areas have ‘multiplier blocks’ which drop a token but can only be opened using a subweapon) which score-hungry players can risk prioritizing over all else. What’s more, each area gives you a Level End Dash bonus if you dash right before you get teleported to the next area. On its own, this may seem like a nifty and easy QTE to get some bonus points, but when you consider the context of trying to get the multiplier tokens and humans at the last possible second, where you are often dashing towards the last human before time runs out, cleanly clearing areas with a level end dash suddenly becomes a whole lot more complicated!

And then there’s all the secondary scoring objectives! Beacons are scoring targets placed near the edges of the screen, whose high base point value makes you want to delay destroying them as late as possible when your multiplier has been raised as much as possible. Visitors appear in the middle section of fights to move through the stage in a set path and drop a multiplier token when all of them are destroyed. Secret exits are hidden in some areas that require you to commit to shooting them either up close or with your subweapon, and upon being triggered will send you to a secret bonus area after clearing the current one. Disruptors are passive enemies that will try to run away from you of which only 4-5 can spawn per world and one per area, but the areas in which they spawn are randomly picked, with the intent to (as their name suggests) disrupt your precious route by introducing more chaos to the mix. Areas can also feature secret humans, which refill your chain meter by ~8 seconds rather than the standard 6, thus enabling more flexible chaining opportunities where you can grab the secret human first to get as many multiplier tokens as possible before the chain depletes or leaving the secret human for the last so you can enter the next stage with an overcharged human chain meter. You also receive a time clear bonus at the end of each world, so not only do you want to do all the above, but you also want to do it as fast as possible. And as for the micro-est of optimizations, destroying background objects also gives you tick points, so yet on top of all this again you want to cause as much background destruction as possible.

The result of all the above, combined with the existing legions of baddies coming at every direction, is gameplay where you are making a ludicrous number of micro-decisions per second. At any time and place there are multiple scoring objectives at different edges of the screen begging for your attention and enemies from every angle begging for your death. High-priority enemies that fill the screen with bullets are combined with high-priority enemies stealing your humans are combined with high-priority Disruptors/Invaders that are only on-screen for a limited amount of time are combined with secondary scoring targets that should be destroyed before the stage ends are combined with enemies that spawn revenge bullets/extra enemies on death are combined with an ever-depleting human chain meter that’s seconds short of running out. Replays of Nex Machina remain engaging because of just how intense and demanding it is, with almost no downtime to speak of. It’s pure and utter arcade.

What’s often the case with arcade games like these is that the spur-of-the-moment decision making they encourage eventually devolves into rote memorization as players try to beat 20-50 minutes of non-stop carnage more consistently, but Nex Machina remains chaotic to the point where improvisation is a more valuable skill to have. The way it accomplishes this is by combining highly volatile mechanics (i.e. mechanics where increasingly smaller differences in input create increasingly different outcomes) with minor (pseudo-)RNG-driven impulses in order to force a deviation in inputs, and so create unpredictability--or chaos for short.

Something similar was done in Ms. Pac-Man. While the original Pac-Man had a lot of volatility due to the way the ghosts would react to the slightest difference in movement, it was also 100% consistent, and the Ms. Pac-Man developers noticed how high-level Pac-Man play would revolve around executing the same ‘perfect’ route, thus largely doing away with the improvisation factor what drew most people in at lower and medium levels of play. To counteract this in Ms. Pac-Man, they had the ghosts move towards a random corner in the scatter phase at the start of each round, before resuming their standard non-random AI routines. This way, the player couldn’t solely rely on preset routes to survive but had to read and predict ghost behavior on the fly. It’s RNG, but it’s so minor that it’s only noticeable at higher levels of play. The minor RNG in Nex Machina serves the same purpose: making improvisation still relevant on higher levels of play, but without introducing too much inconsistency at any level of play. Of course, memorizing a strategy or a route still plays a large part when chasing high scores in Nex Machina, but it’s not all memorization, and that’s what helps keep it feeling fresh.

Nex Machina has volatility in spades. Because hordes of enemies and bullets moving towards you is a near-constant factor, the slightest deviation in inputs easily spirals out into unpredictable situations. The inaccurate nature of the twin-stick control scheme means that aiming or moving in the exact same directions each run is hard to consistently reproduce. The presence of long-term systems like the human chain meter and item bar means that micro-differences in input have future micro-consequences: entering an area with 25% chain meter left instead of 50% affects how long you can afford to delay grabbing humans or how much of a priority they are, which in turn affects future decisions and decisions after that. The item bar being filled by destroying enemies means that because of the massive and dense waves of enemies, you can only roughly predict where exactly an item will drop. Forgoing to kill optional enemies in turn makes it harder to memorize when said items might drop. Enemies that spawn bullets or smaller enemies on death add even more stuff on screen that makes things harder to control. On Master difficulty enemies will on death shoot revenge bullets towards you, thus making small deviation spiral out even more noticeably (in addition to enemy types that do on-death attacks on any difficulty), and both the player and the enemy move faster, increasing the pressure and making it more likely to make imperfect inputs. On Hero difficulty you must deal with even faster/denser revenge bullets and every power-up drop spawning an expanding laser circle, whose positions you can also only roughly predict.

Then there’s the little pockets of RNG. Some enemies move in random directions or have a slightly randomly offset spawn position, which combined with the way item drops work makes their spawns even harder to predict in advance. Humans don’t completely stand still but instead randomly and slowly roam about their spawn point, which then affects where human stealer-type enemies will go and which human they will prioritize, on top of you having to adjust your human chaining routes. Some enemy types begin bouncing or shooting in random directions or orientations on spawn. The most notable example of RNG are the Disruptors, whose placement and appearance are certainly randomly picked out of a handful of preset solutions.

What then prevents Nex Machina from feeling like uncontrollable chaotic nonsense is that the player has the tools to deal with everything consistently, and that Nex Machina does not demand absolute precision. The most notable example of this is how often Shield pick-ups are dropped (provided the player has all other item upgrades), which means that small one-off mistakes do not result in immediate death spirals. Similarly, the game is quite lenient with extra lives, which are completely divorced from scoring and can be found in secret spots, of which there are about 2-3 in each world. The human chain meter is also quite lenient in how fast it depletes (especially when compared to other chaining systems like those in the Dodonpachi series). Each area is designed to always have a close-by human near each starting point that you can always reach in time, provided you nail the level end dash of the previous area (which replenishes a bit of human chain meter when nailed). The triple dash gives you a lenient amount of i-frames to dash through bullets and enemies with, and recharges relatively fast. Subweapons allow you to dispatch multiple tankier enemies at once, and your primary shot with the spread upgrade is wide enough that aiming accurately isn’t that important. The RNG in Nex Machina does affect potential clear time and the potential end-of-world score bonus you get for clearing the world quickly, which might suck if you’re speedrunner. But thankfully, this score bonus always caps out at 4 minutes and 30 seconds. If you clear it under that time, you will get the highest possible score bonus, meaning that getting slightly subpar clear times (because of RNG) won’t be damning to your score. To conclude, even if some details are unpredictable or have random deviation, it’s well within your toolset to deal with them.

It's when you don’t have that toolset that Nex Machina feels like some straight bullshit, which the Single World mode nicely showcases. There you start each run in a world of choice without your upgrades--your triple dash, weapon spread, dash explosion and weapon range--leaving you only with a narrow peashooter and limited mobility. For the first world this is relatively doable since it’s designed around you starting naked, but in the later worlds (or starting the first world on higher difficulties) you are increasingly dependent on the random upgrade item order to give you the actually useful upgrades first (triple dash and weapon spread) because of how quickly things spiral. I often find myself having to restart a dozen times in the first world after making a small mistake that with all my upgrades either could have been avoided or compensated for.

Not all implementations of RNG in Nex Machina are ideal, of which the random upgrade item order is the most noticeable. Some upgrades are more helpful to the survival of your un-upgraded ass than others. Triple Dash and Weapon Spread, for example, make it much easier to control crowds than Weapon Range or Dash Explosion. Shields seem useful to have at first, but the other four upgrades are better at preventing you from being in a situation where you’re in danger of being hit to begin with. The upgrade order is completely out of the player’s control, and scoring/survival can deviate strongly because of that. For that reason, it would have helped if the upgrade order was static (where Triple Dash and Weapon Spread are preferably the first two), or if the player could control the upgrade order somehow, or if power-ups were styled a la Cho Ren Sha 68K/Crimzon Clover where it’s a spinning circle of all possible power-ups from which you can pick only one.

The chaos that Disruptors create is also not used as effectively as it could have been. If Disruptors spawn close enough when you teleport into a new area, then you can gib them in a second and deal with the rest of the enemies as usual, which makes Disruptors not disrupt much of anything. It then would have helped if Disruptors did not spawn immediately when the player enters a new area, and if Disruptors always spawned outside your range or behind other enemies, where it could then sow more chaos. It would have also helped if Disruptors could never spawn in the penultimate areas leading up to the boss fight of each world, which are intentionally always easy breezy to build up the boss fight coming after. Disruptors then spawning in those areas feels like RNGesus giving you a freebie, which is why they’re better off always spawning in the ‘real’ areas of each world.

Although the boss fights in Nex Machina are built up as the climax of a world, they ironically feel more like moments of rest compared to the intensity of regular gameplay. Human chaining and secondary scoring objectives cease playing a role during boss fights, so the only optimizations left are not getting hit and dealing as much damage as possible. The target prioritization and crowd control of regular gameplay barely play a role in boss fights, as bosses instead opt to throw bullet patterns at you. Combine the lack of scoring opportunities with the relaxed intensity, and you end up with boss fights in NM feeling like a lesser mode of gameplay. Arcade games with chaining systems do often relax scoring requirements during boss fights or slightly alter how it works for bosses only (since it’s hard to ‘chain’ a single enemy), but they make up for it by having the boss be more intense to fight. In Nex Machina, the only truly intense bosses are the TLB and the fifth boss; the former takes the kids’ gloves off the bullet pattern design and goes all out, and the latter attacks you from multiple angles using multiple destroyable parts, which is more in line with regular gameplay. It could have been neat if chaining humans was still a thing you had to do during boss fights, either by spawning more of them in as the fight progresses or by relaxing the depletion rate of the chain meter for bosses only. Having boss fights be designed around spawning multiple targets (like the Architect fight) would also make them more in line with the strengths of the rest of the game.

One downside of Nex Machina’s reliance on secrets for scoring is that it creates a massive knowledge barrier if you want to begin scoring semi-competently. While most arcade games feature scoring tricks that’s more a matter of knowledge than being able to apply them, at least you usually won’t know about their existence and what you’re missing out on. Secrets in arcade games can be useful for staggering the rate at which the player is taught about the game instead of overwhelming them from the get-go, but having too many secrets can turn people away due to the sheer amount of stuff they need to memorize. This is further exacerbated by the fact that you’re made very aware of the existence of secrets in Nex Machina. At the end of each world, you see all the secrets you missed, which is psychologically more deflating than if you never knew you missed some to begin with. Thus, it gives off the feeling that the game wants you to go look up all secrets beforehand. This goes double when you consider that extra lives aren’t tied to scoring, but that they’re placed in secret spots you must shoot. Even if you just want a basic survival clear, memorizing the spots of all extra life pick-ups becomes essential, and having to look up external videos or analyze replays just to learn about the secrets is a hurdle more suited for score-chasers than people who just want a basic 1cc.

Second problem is that the discovery of secrets isn’t that interesting either. Your main methods of interaction with the world are moving around and shooting things, meaning that discovering secrets for yourself involves having to keep the last enemy alive and shoot/explore all edges of an area (all 70+ of them) to see what yells and what doesn’t. It’s a tedious and boring process. Watching a YouTube video or an in-game replay speeds things up, though arguably not having to consult external resources for a basic survival clear at all would be more useful. Nex Machina doesn’t have much in the way of exploration or puzzles or hidden interactions to make the discovery of secrets feel more exciting, nor would there be much potential to make discovery interesting within Nex Machina’s limited design scope. If there’s no way of making discovery of secrets more interesting, then it might have helped to make the secrets more obvious or announce their presence in one way or another (like how the presence of a Disruptor is announced at the start of each round), or to rework them to no longer be secret (f.e. having extra lives no longer be tied to secret spots).

One curious thing about Nex Machina is that its human chaining system is objectively an arbitrary system completely divorced from survival or normal gameplay, yet wanting to save the humans seems to come almost intuitively. The rate at which you gain extra lives is fixed, and the rate at which items are dropped does not increase the more humans you grab. But even so, you still want to try and save them (or at least, I hope you do). Why is that? The trick is entirely psychological: you care because the objects you must grab appear like fellow humans, even if they are a completely abstract representation of a human being. Rescuing humans feels good, and seeing humans get captured in front of you feels worse. The fact that the subject involves fellow humans instills more feelings than if it had been some featureless geometric shape. Even if rescuing abstract representations of human beings wouldn’t instill any feelings by itself, having them be actively taken away from you and having that loss be shoved in your face is certainly a feeling you would go out of your way to avoid. It is this appeal to humanitarianism that drives people to engage with an otherwise completely optional system that rewards you with nothing other than extra arbitrary points, which just shows how powerful and all-encompassing the indomitable human spirit is (although Mars Matrix proves that appealing to human greed and having to grab gold instead of human beings is just as effective).

I bring this up because scoring systems, or any gameplay systems for that matter, can appear arbitrary and forced when they don’t come “naturally”, leading to people refusing to engage with it or even despising its inclusion. If the base game has a certain gameplay/narrative goal (f.e. staying alive, or looking cool), and the system involves doing something that has nothing to do with that or even the polar opposite (i.e. letting yourself get hit and killed, like in Battle Garegga), then it’s quite literally counter-intuitive. The scoring system could objectively make the game more engaging, but people would nonetheless bounce off it or believe it’s overdesigned. The issue here too, is entirely psychological.

There must be narrative framing or synergy with existing gameplay systems to make systems feel more intuitive and feel natural. In Nex Machina, if you are good at not getting hit and keeping your shield, you are rewarded with a wider primary shot. Narratively that’s arbitrary, but gameplay-wise being rewarded for not dying comes naturally, since ‘not dying’ is in part what you are trying to do the whole game. In JRPGs, enemies are usually not resistant or weak to arbitrary shapes or colors, but rather real-life elements like fire or water. That fire creatures take more damage from water attacks doesn’t appear as an arbitrary rule (even if it technically is), it’s just common IRL sense that fire is weak to water. That flying enemies in Doom Eternal take more damage from the Arbalest does on the other hand appear to be completely arbitrary, because there’s nothing to suggest why they would take more damage from it or what makes the Arbalest so special. But if you reframed the flying enemies as being perpetually on fire and the Arbalest shooting ice stalactites then suddenly it feels a lot more intuitive, even though the underlying mechanics haven’t changed. Appealing to intuition is important for helping a player understand the game and intrinsically motivating them to engage with systems. In Nex Machina, that intuition is “humans should be rescued” and that intrinsic motivation is “saving humans makes me feel good”, and sometimes that’s all you need.

Visually Nex Machina can be unreadable nonsense with its many enemies and particle effects, but the user interface and sound design goes out of its way to make the game readable. So the player and all enemies have outline highlights to make them stand out from the backgrounds, off-screen enemies are telegraphed with arrows at the edges of the screen, your dash and subweapon gauge are displayed around the player character when used and play sounds for when they’re empty/recharged, the last enemy of an area is always highlighted with pink (in case you need to grab all remaining human first), enemy spawns are always telegraphed with silhouettes, the positions of humans are highlighted with arrows stretching from the player characters towards them, those arrows will blink red when the human is about to be captured by an enemy, and the state of your human chain meter (normally shown on the top right of the screen) is displayed double on each human in the form of a ring around the human that slowly shrinks the more the chain meter depletes, so you don’t have to take your eyes off the action to check a bar in the corner of the screen. About the only thing missing is a progress bar showing you the % of enemies you have killed per area, to give you a better idea of when you should draw out grabbing humans and when you should grab them ASAP.

It must be however said that despite being visually readable, Nex Machina’s visual style really does not lend itself to this kind of game. There is a lot of detail in the background and enemy design that, because of the speed of the gameplay and zillion things demanding your attention at once and the crazy neat particle/voxelization effects on top of everything, the player simply has no time to really appreciate or even take in the visuals. Like driving 200mph in a racing car, all the background and finer details turn into a blur, to the point where I feel that all the effort in the backgrounds and enemy design has been wasted. Shoot ‘em ups like the Raiden or Darius games can afford to have beautiful, detailed backgrounds because their scrolling speed is usually slow enough that you have the time to take in all the background details. In Nex Machina, I only started to notice the details on repeat playthroughs or when watching videos/replays. The zoomed-out top-down perspective is essential for the gameplay to work, but it also means you won’t often get a good look at the backgrounds or the enemies from up close. Enemies are thankfully distinguishable enough because of their silhouettes, but design-wise most of them come off as red blobs, which in turn comes at the expense of character. Here I wish that Nex Machina had a more abstract art direction to allow its designs and backgrounds to be fully taken in even at high speeds and under multiple layers of particle effects filling the screen. It might have helped with getting the player to connect with the game at a more personal level.

In conclusion, Nex Machina is a wonderful example of how well-designed scoring systems, little bits of RNG, and a love for humanity can further elevate an already great set of core systems. It looked for a while that this might have been the final high note Housemarque was about to end on, but it seems that with Returnal they intend to continue to enrich the world with more of that arcade goodness.

Ne, ne, nex machine
Finland’s greatest arcade machine

Disco Elysium is a reminder. A painful one at that.

No, not a reminder of what we knew. It always comes in bouts, that stumbling around attempting to find meaning in the world that is painted in garish colors of conflict and ideologies that tear us apart, that harsh critique of what we are capable of as people. The ways our lives are completely connected in ways that drive us to the brink of despair, building towards a pale that rips at the edges of the world before the whole book cracks at the seams and turns the paper to shreds. No, that's nothing new.

That's something any cynical mindset could create really, even if they had the prose as excellent as this game did, or the character writing this painstakingly real. That's doable. What it really reminds me of, is our emotions, yknow that feeling thing. That helps us really understand each other at our core, is how we as people can live. Living with the loss, the many many many casualties not just personal but also in our own heads. Or as Disco Elysium really well puts it by the end after a long long conversation, "dealing with all this shit." At the end of the day, we're capable of understanding each other, and you don't need to drink yourself to the point of amnesia just so you can find the steps to get there.

That definitely sounds more verbose than a game which painfully relies too much on the odds of sentences landing with a roll of the dice may deserve, but this work was fucking profound to me. Compared to my earlier impressions, of which I really did look like the bumbling cop nihilistically walking away thinking all of it was worthless, I find myself hoping that everyone I know gets around to playing this.

ELEX marks Piranha Bytes’ sixth take on their tried-and-true Gothic formula. For the non-Europeans those who have never played any Piranha Bytes games before, here's a quick introduction. PB games stand out from other RPGs through their small yet dense game worlds. Players progression is soft-gated through high-level enemies rather than physical barriers. This way skilled enough players can edge their way into parts of the world they’re not supposed to be in yet. Then there's a progression curve that–relative to most RPGs–has you start from level negative five. You will start off as such a useless sod that even a basic oversized chicken is a major threat to your life; something you must grow to overcome by running away and kissing the boots of those stronger than you. This time, the world is one of the biggest PB has ever made, and you get a jetpack right at the start of the game. How does it pan out?

The exploration in ELEX is downright addicting. What starts as a short stroll in the woods towards a quest objective turns into a constant string of “oooh, what’s that?”`. You'll end up taking detour after detour, going from one interesting landmark to the next. After scavenging everything you can find–only an hour later will you remember what it was you came here for in the first place. Despite the size of ELEX's world, it’s consistently dense with stuff to explore, and there's always another landmark in sight of another. The only exception is the region of Ignadon, which f.e. has only half or 2/3rds the amount of quests compared to the other two main regions, despite being as large. It also helps that the quest design in ELEX is good at sending you towards different parts of the world where you can (hopefully) get sidetracked.

ELEX’s world is on an intrinsic level appealing to explore because of the jetpack. In past PB games the main obstacles you faced were enemies blocking your path, but now the terrain itself is a major obstacle. The world terrain features much more vertical variation compared to previous PB games, as there are way more structures and landmarks that make you go “can I climb that?”. 99% of the time, you can, and 99% of the time you’ll also find an item up there as well! There are almost no invisible walls in ELEX that get in the way of your exploration; the only limit is your jetpack fuel.

One would think that a jetpack would trivialize combat and exploration, but turns out it's quite well balanced! The jetpack only allows you to gain height for about six seconds, and takes about three times as long to recharge from 0 to 100. Fuel only recharges if you’re standing on a solid surface. Infinite flight isn’t possible, and fuel takes too long to recharge to spam the jetpack in combat. Climbing terrain then isn’t a matter of ‘hold spacebar to climb’. It does take planning and fuel management to fly over gaps and climb buildings. In combat the jetpack doesn’t have much use outside of running away or shooting enemies mid-air.

With flight being a thing, PB was finally forced to address the longstanding issue of using high ground to cheese enemies. PB made the decision to give almost all enemies ranged attacks that can lead you. Meaning, they shoot towards where you are moving towards rather than where you are. As most combat in ELEX takes place on open plains or hills, this is definitely a sensible decision. This way you can’t just fly or circlestrafe to cheese most enemies, now that they can snipe you out of the sky. There are other ranged attack types (such as homing/interruptible hitscan) that ELEX could have used to vary things up, but sadly it never does.

Though the exploration in ELEX is great, its rewards are rather disappointing. Expect to find a lot of junk items, healing/mana potions, some cash, some crafting materials, or a piece of lore. Sometimes you will find an actually powerful piece of gear… with such insane stat requirements that it takes 10 more hours of leveling to equip. All the above is of course still valuable, but the fact that most places in the world yield more of the same makes it rather predictable and unexciting. Of course there must be more low-value than high-value finds to make the latter feel appropriately rewarding, but in ELEX that ratio is too skewed towards the former.

That ELEX reduces the average value gained per square unit explored does make some sense, however. In earlier PB games the worlds were relatively smaller, so for every square meter explored you were more likely to find a high-value item. In ELEX the world is larger, yet just as dense with items. This results in a greater total amount of items to discover, which for a game like this makes the difficulty curve and economy much harder to balance. If ELEX kept the same low/high-value find ratio of the old games, there’d be so many good items to find through a bit of exploration that the player would become too strong too early, likely resulting in the player being bored as they steamroll through most of the world without too much effort. Thus it was necessary to reduce the value you get on average out of exploration. Yet, the end result of the rewards for exploration not being exciting persists. The design challenge here is as follows: How do you maintain a reasonable difficulty curve and keep rewards for exploration exciting, while having a high density of discoverable items spread out across a much larger surface area?

One method ELEX already uses is to ‘split’ high-value items into parts and spread them across the world (akin to collecting Heart Pieces in The Legend of Zelda to create Heart Containers). For example, the world contains a lot of Natural Elex that’s not that useful on its own, but you can combine several pieces to craft Elex Potions for attribute/skill points. There’s also Gemstones, which you can slot into gear to give you minor stat boosts. Smaller Gemstones can then be combined to create larger ones which provide greater boosts. This way there’s a noticeable sense of progression without rewarding the player with too much power for exploring a small part of the world. The implementation of those ideas in ELEX are rather flawed (certain vendors can sell infinite amounts of Natural Elex to the point where finding Natural Elex in the wild doesn’t feel as rewarding anymore, and Gemstones are so rare to find that even in my semi-completionist playthrough I only had enough Gemstones to make one (1) Large Gemstone), but the idea behind them is sound.

ELEX also prevents you from being able to equip powerful gear you find until you meet certain stat requirements. These are necessary in games like this to some extent, but in the context of ELEX they are absurdly balanced. In practice, you often won’t be able to equip that nice gun you found until ten or twenty more hours of leveling up. The costs for increasing your stats increase the higher the stats themselves get (when a stat is over 30 it costs 2 attribute points to raise it by one, and when it’s over 60 it costs five points to raise it by one), so if you also factor in that all armor/weapons have requirements for two different stats, and that most of the gear you find have requirements around 50 or higher, it’s going to take a little while until you get there. To rub more salt in the wound, even if you do finally meet the stat requirements, you’ll find that most high-tier gear you find in the wild isn’t even that good compared to what you can buy from the store and upgrade yourself–on top of having more reasonable stat requirements to boot! In fact, one of the most powerful melee weapons in the game is just a fully upgraded store weapon. So you often can’t use a lot of weapons you find through exploration, and by the time you meet the requirements you’ve most likely found a better alternative already.

This is where the ‘split’ method could be applied to gear. By ‘splitting’ gear into components spread out across the world, the player can still feel a sense of progress for having found a part of a powerful item that can later be combined into one. This should reduce the need for absurd stat requirements in high-tier gear as well. Dividing a high-tier item across several high-level areas or from materials dropped by killing high-level enemies should already pose enough of an implicit stat requirement of its own.

Splitting items has its limits when there’s not that many items to split to begin with, so another solution is to add more items by introducing more item categories. The currently available equipment categories in ELEX are for weapons, shields, body armor, helmets, leg armor, one ring and one necklace, but so you could also add categories for things like gloves, boots, belts, another ring, earrings, or cyber-implants. Since finding a new piece of equipment in the wild only feels valuable if it’s better than your existing gear or if it has an unique use case (like masks that offer radiation/poison resistance, or can be broken down into useful crafting materials), scaling out horizontally by adding more types of gear allows you to populate the world with more equipment that feels unique and valuable. The player being encouraged to multi-class in ELEX is also a good extension of this idea. It means that more weapon types and thus more items one finds through exploration are more relevant to one’s playstyle, whereas earlier PB games tended to focus more on pure builds with a single weapon category. The only caveats to scaling out gear horizontally is that the difficulty curve of the game should factor in the player having an item equipped for every category, and that the economy should factor in the player being able to buy an item for most categories. Keep also in mind that there’s only so many equipment categories you can make: a massive amount of categories could devalue each individual item category, the equipment system could become Armored Core-levels of complicated in a way that doesn’t suit what the game is going for, and having a humanoid player character be equipped with so many different items and baubles could feel a bit silly.

Another option is to scale out vertically by adding more equipment tiers per equipment category. That way there’s a lot more stuff to find per equipment category before you get your hands on the highest-tier gear, thus keeping the world populated with useful items that aren't immediately too powerful. ELEX already applies this by having most weapons come in four minor tiers of power, on top of major tiers per weapon category that have actually different names but the same moveset. For this to properly work, there would also need to be more enemy ‘tiers’ to exercise this newfound power against (be it through new enemy types, variations of existing enemy types, or a pack of lower-tier enemies that you’d have to fight all at once). If mid-tier gear is enough to deal with endgame enemies, then the higher equipment tiers are overkill. You could balance the highest equipment tier around the highest enemy tier, but if you then try to squeeze in a 1000 equipment tiers even though there are only 5 enemy tiers, then the end result is an incremental sense of progression which feels like the only difference between an old and a new weapon is that it does +1 damage. It’s hard to appreciate new gear you found if it’s barely any different from your old gear. You need to strike a good balance between the amount of enemy tiers and weapon tiers, depending on how many assets (weapon/enemy models, animations) you can afford to create and how large you plan to make the world.

Finally you can add another dimension to itemization by letting the player modify and upgrade existing gear using upgrade items. This reduces the need for horizontal scaling by introducing more equipment-relevant items that aren’t actually equipment items. It also reduces the need for vertical scaling, since being able to make low-tier items as strong as high-tier ones would reduce the amount of equipment tiers necessary. Such upgrade items can function as one-time consumables or reusable modifiers you can equip onto equipment, like the aforementioned Gemstones. These upgrade items themselves can also be tiered, split into parts/upgrade when combined, and either apply to all equipment categories or some/one of them. Care must be taken to not make upgrade items too powerful and versatile, otherwise there’s little point in finding better tiers/uniques of an equipment type (beyond slightly higher base stats) when you can already upgrade a low-tier weapon to be as strong as a high-tier one. ELEX manages to avoid this by limiting the amount of Gemstone slots on a weapon by its weapon tier, where higher weapon tiers have more slots to put gemstones into compared to lower tier ones.

To sum it up, we’ve added more item categories, added more tiers per item category, relaxed the stat requirements for items, introduced upgrade items that can modify items, and also split all aforementioned items in parts and recipes for good measure. Will that be enough to populate a large world with useful but not-too-powerful items in a way that’s satisfying? Well, no. Populating the world with useful items like upgrade potions and higher-DPS weapons is one thing, but populating it with interesting items is another. If the only thing better items do is the exact same thing as the previous tiers but with a higher armor/damage value, then all you’ve done is establish more progression for the sake of progression. Such number-goes-up itemization holds nothing new and no surprises by itself, leaving no sense of excitement to be had.

The secret ingredient behind what makes upgrades exciting is precisely all the new gameplay opportunities they open up. Exploration in Metroid wouldn’t be as rewarding if Energy/Missile Tanks were the only items you could discover, since they usually don’t open up any new opportunities. Stat upgrades like Energy/Missile Tanks or all the methods I listed above only serve to make the world feel less empty by populating it with useful rewards, but they cannot be a substitute for creating interesting rewards.

ELEX’s gear rewards aren’t very interesting because the only new things better gear offers is usually just a higher attack/armor value. There is no leg armor that does anything but increase your armor stat, most helmets (aside from sunglasses and the Protective Mask) only increase your armor stat, and all body armor also only increases your armor + poise. Rings and amulets are a bit more special in this regard because they can boost your skills or attributes, but given the aforementioned insane weapon stat requirements, I ended up mostly wearing rings and amulets that let me equip a better weapon. Even unique weapons with special names don’t do anything special. First, they are always based on an existing weapon that you can buy in a store, and thus don’t have any unique moves or modes attached to them that other weapons of the same type don’t have. Second, they might come with elemental buffs or gemstone sockets pre-applied, but since you can craft those on any weapon yourself it hardly makes those “uniques” unique. Aside from the sunglasses and the hilariously broken amulet that lets you survive one lethal blow (an effect you can reset by re-equipping the amulet), most gear does not provide any unique effects or synergies or anything that can change the way you play, like in Diablo or Baldur’s Gate. Since finding a better sword by itself isn’t as satisfying as it is in Gothic or Risen, giving weapons more unique and interesting effects (both in combat and outside of combat) could allow one to populate the world with a greater amount and variety of equipment items without having to scale equipment out horizontally/vertically as much. Either ELEX should have introduced new gear properties/systems to justify strewing so much gear around the world, or it should have shrunk down the world to accommodate the gear potential it already had.

While Gothic and Risen took an even more basic number-go-up approach than ELEX to gear progression, it ironically did work out better for those games. One reason being that each better equipment item that you did get was a major and noticeable upgrade because there were less equipment tiers. Every armor set in Gothic/Risen represented a major milestone that required you to do several quests and save up a ton of money just to be able to unlock it. They wouldn't be as impactful if you'd get more new armor sets in the same timespan. The second reason is that Gothic/Risen's worlds were filled with gatekeeper NPCs who would gib your unarmored underleveled ass if you got too close. Putting on better armor posed an immediately noticeable increase in your chances of survival against them. The excitement from finding better gear in those games stemmed from all the new areas and potential for exploration that opened up for you, much like finding a key item in a Metroidvania. Of course, finding better gear in ELEX serves a similar purpose, but that sense of progression is way more incremental and thus less pronounced due to the greater amount of equipment items, categories, and tiers present in ELEX–not to mention that ELEX has way less clearly defined gate(keeper)s to test your newfound strength against.

The larger world of ELEX has not only caused the value of itemization to be stretched out, but enemy design as well. I’m not upset at the fact that enemies are reskinned at all–that is simply an inevitable reality of game production–but rather that there is not much variation in enemy behavior and attack design. It's a problem that applies not only between enemy variants, but whole enemy archetypes as well. Whether it’s a Biter or a high-level Stalker, how you approach them is identical: dodge their attacks and stunlock them during the gaps in their attack strings for as long as your stamina and surrounding enemies allow. The only variables that change is the HP/armor/damage on the enemy, whether they have ranged attacks at all, and the animations + punish/dodge windows in their attack strings. Dealing with melee attacks is mainly a matter of timing your backstep/roll button, and rarely about positioning, which curbs the potential variety in enemy melee attacks. Ranged attacks too almost often only come in the form of a projectile with leading, but never spreadshots/lasers/homing/area-of-denial attacks/etc. There are only a few NPCs that use explosives, but that’s about it. Enemy behavior (such as how aggressive they are, how they respond to your actions, whether they can interact with other enemies such as by buffing others or use group tactics) also remains the same throughout. Enemies trying to impede you indirectly (such as by inflicting debuffs, altering the environment, etc.) is also something that rarely ever happens. Only humanoid enemies behave differently from wildlife since they can block your attacks and prefer to use ranged attacks at range. While there are several firearms with unique firemodes and spells and stims available to the player, humanoid NPCs don’t seem very interested in using these. The end result is that once you’ve gotten familiar with the combat system and gotten some decent gear, each fight will play out similarly. For a game where you’ll be doing a lot of fighting, that is not exactly a boon to making each part of the world feel unique.

Even if the enemy NPCs and their variants were more varied in behavior and how you had to fight them, there’s still the issue of having to spread them out across the world in a way that’s not repetitive. There’s only so many enemies and variants that can be reasonably put in the game after all, especially with Piranha Bytes’ AA-level budget and manpower. For this reason it’s important that existing enemy types are combined with each other to create new unique combat scenarios with the same assets, and that enemies are designed in a way where they can synergize and play off of each other to facilitate this approach to encounter design. This may sound asinine to bring up (especially if you’ve read my other reviews), but it bears repeating in ELEX’s case. External modifiers (things like difficult terrain, weather, environmental hazards, interactable environmental objects, or other magic nonsense) can be overlaid on top of a combat zone to multiply the amount of mileage you get out of the few enemy types you have. This would however require that enemies more often attack you in groups/packs, and that they aren’t as susceptible to being picked off one-by-one. That would otherwise defeat the entire point of combining enemies to create new combat scenarios. Of course, even with the above there’s only so many combinations you can make, but at that point you should ask yourself whether your world isn’t just too big to accommodate what little content you have.

That brings us to the second main culprit of ELEX’s lackadaisical balancing: it’s utter and total devotion to non-linear progression. ELEX takes the non-linearity of its forebears even further by letting you go anywhere you want after you exit the tutorial zone, with almost no invisible barriers or story gates holding you back. Such non-linearity doesn’t need to be a bad thing at all. If anything, ELEX’s quest design massively benefits from being able to progress quests out-of-order by being able to find key items or deal with key NPCs before having even started the relevant quests (unlike prior Gothic games where said items/NPCs only spawn after having started the quests… in locations you’ve already explored). Rather, the issue with ELEX’s approach of total freed.om of progression is that it makes it significantly more difficult (but not impossible) to balance character progression, item progression, story progression, and enemy populations, since the player can tackle most content in any order. It’s possible to predict non-linear outcomes and entry points to smaller isolated entities like quests and dungeons, but how do you as a designer predict such things for a massive overworld?

Prior PB games were renowned for their freedom of exploration (especially relative to most mainstream RPGs at the time), but they were–for good reason–not that free. The crux lies in how the games handle how the worlds of those games changed as the main story progressed.

In Gothic I, when the main story moved to a new chapter, most of its world got refreshed with new content. Wildernesses would be repopulated with higher-level enemies (but lower-level enemies would not be despawned, thus not screwing you over if you didn’t systematically exterminate every single NPC for XP per chapter), and NPCs would offer new quests. This meant that the world by hand adjusted itself to match the player’s progress in strength, and also helped the world feel alive by having it respond to changes in the main story. Yet, this approach of refreshing the entire world can only realistically work when its surface area is small enough and when the new content itself is fresh enough. The greater the surface area, the more content would need to be refreshed, which from a production standpoint becomes exponentially more taxing. Not to mention that the player would be expected to sweep most of the world again just to come into contact with the new content, which is something that increasingly feels like forced backtracking and padding the larger the world is. This approach also only works if the refreshed content has truly new story/gameplay ramifications, otherwise it too will come off as padding.

Gothic II had a larger world compared to its prequel, and instead of periodically refreshing the entire game world, it instead cleverly decided to refresh only one part of it. The way that worked is by structuring the world around a central hub–the Khorinis Mainland. In one chapter the player would explore the mainland, then the next chapter a hard-gated border zone would be unlocked (the Old Valley of the Mine, Jharkendar) featuring higher-level content appropriate to the player’s expected level at that point in the main story. The main story then expects the player to explore and do quests in that area, after which they’re led back to the Mainland, which has since been refreshed with new content while the player was away in a border area. This usually brought with it a meaningful change in the situation, such as the introduction of Seekers or an Orc invasion, after which the process repeats itself. Since the border areas are situated on the borders of the world, the player is less likely to pass through them again while backtracking or doing Mainland quests, which means that their lack of new content won’t be noticed. The fact that all the refreshed content is only placed in the central hub/crossroads of the world means that the player is more likely to “organically” (i.e. guided by the designer’s graceful hand) come across all the changes and new content as they’re backtracking. This way they are more likely to engage with it out of their own curiosity and initiative, rather than being told by an NPC that they should investigate something in position XY, which can feel like it is invalidating player agency. Now that the designer can reasonably predict how the player progresses through the world, new level-appropriate content can be placed in areas that the player is likely to visit and come across.

Now compare this to ELEX. Here, almost nothing is gated, and after the tutorial zone the player can go about anywhere anytime. The fact that there’s shit to explore in practically every direction makes it very likely for the player to get pulled into every which way, making predicting player progression through the world rather difficult.

Besides that, ELEX has only three story acts, where the bulk of all side-quests (save for some companion quests) can be completed in the first act. There is no pressing reason to progress the main story, and if you’ve played a few RPGs, you are most likely used to completing as much of the side content as possible before progressing the main story (out of a merited fear of the sidequests permanently disappearing otherwise, as is already the case in ELEX with the Domed City). If you do all the sidequests first and the main story second, then the world will appear barren and its settlements lifeless now that there's no reason to interact with the rest of the world. Only the Domed City changes noticeably after the main story progresses, and even then it doesn’t offer you any new content when it does.

For this reason it would have helped if there were more main story acts and if more sidequests were gated in later acts, but this presents another issue: how do you notify the player that there's new quests available across vastly different parts in the world? Now that the designer cannot predict how the player will backtrack and place new content along that path, either the player must manually check each settlement and/or NPC to see if anything's new, which is time-consuming, or the player must be notified through either phone calls or messenger NPCs spawning near you to notify you that's something new. But the latter has its limits; it feels a bit silly if after a story act change you are bombarded with a dozen NPCs at once telling you you can progress their questline (which is something that actually happens when you visit your companion hub after a story act change). Given the design challenges here, it's understandable why PB would skip all this hassle by just making all side-quests available from the start.

The above paragraphs mostly concern themselves with anticipating progress between major zones of the world, but what about gating progress within those zones? The most common approach by PB games is to have high-level enemies soft-gate your progress, and nudge you towards areas more suited for your level. Instances of this do exist in ELEX, but they seem to be rather applied for guarding small buildings or inlets containing phat loot, rather than guarding larger areas. Even if higher-level enemies were spread out across larger areas, they still wouldn't be effective gatekeepers since enemies in ELEX have trouble chasing you down at all. Not to mention that it makes slipping by them rather unrewarding because of how easy it then tends to be. One of the reasons for this is that enemies never sprint towards you at full speed. Bizarrely, enemies in ELEX can sprint at high speeds, but they only ever do this if you point a ranged weapon at them. The jetpack also makes it easier to simply fly over any would-be gatekeepers, especially once you know how to dodge leading projectiles. That is something that can only be solved by introducing new ranged attacks for enemies that are significantly harder to avoid, or by making the jetpack itself upgradeable so it starts weak, just like how the player character has very limited stamina at the start of the game.

Another victim of this total freedom approach is the difficulty curve. Assuming that the player doesn’t use one of the game’s many exploits or broken tactics, the ‘hobo phase’ (the start of the game when the player is still weak and must scrounge by using any means possible) lasts too long, whereas after that the game completely dissipates in terms of difficulty, offering no meaningful enemy barriers after that point. Admittedly, no PB game ever had a difficulty curve that didn’t fold halfway through the game, but at the very least they still had a functional hobo phase. Yet in ELEX, the player is so weak relative to the average enemy roaming around the starting settlements that they have no choice but to do non-combat quests in towns for several hours before having the stats and money to equip the gear necessary to survive the wilderness and get into actual combat for once. While that is part of the hobo phase too, making it last for so long as in ELEX’s case can make it feel like the game’s just about being an errand boy. At least other Gothic games were more generous with placing weaker versions of enemies in the world.

Once you do hit the magic threshold (which is usually getting the stats to equip a weapon that deals decent damage), the world folds. The grand majority of overworld enemies can be reliably solo’d, you have enough healing potions at that point to mitigate most damage, and the only higher-level enemies are present in isolated pockets that are easily avoidable. From what I can tell, ELEX attempted to balance the fact that the player can go anywhere by balancing most overworld enemies to be mid-level. If the goal is total freedom, then each route should be equally valid, which can mean that each route should be equally dangerous. This would then result in the aforementioned overlong hobo phase (since lower level enemies are hard to come by) and the world having little to offer after you do reach mid-level.

The issue of insane stat requirements on gear can also be traced to the fact that the player can go anywhere at any time. A game whose world had some zones that were hard-gated could simply place higher-level gear in higher-level zones that the player can’t access to begin with until they reach a higher level, while populating the parts that the player can access with weapons more appropriate to their expected level range. Same thing goes for enemies: by gating world progression in a way where the designer can predict how much progress the player has made, they can then have the player fight more level-appropriate enemies. For example, in Fallout: New Vegas the player can take a short route to New Vegas by passing through mountain ranges filled with deadly high-level Cazadors or Deathclaws, or they can take the long and scenic route populated with more level-appropriate NPCs and quests. When the designer cannot predict how the player might make their progress through the world, they're forced to take a one-size-fits-all solution (level scaling in Bethesda’s games, or in ELEX’s case, respawning the world with enemy types depending on the player’s level) to enemy balancing, with limited success.

ELEX did introduce a new (for PB games) way of soft-gating the world: through environmental hazards, or danger zones as I like to call them. Step into a danger zone, and you receive a debuff that saps your health until you leave the zone. You then only have a limited amount of time to go about your business if you don’t want to die, which automatically acts as a barrier for the ill-prepared. It also brings with it interesting trade-offs. So you need to decide if you want to equip gear with a worse armor value but a better ailment resistance if you want to survive the danger zone itself, while leaving you weaker against enemies within the danger zone. So having to spend one buff slot on ailment resistance stims is one slot you can’t use on something else (which matters if your playstyle is reliant on stims). Of course you can try to force your way through the danger zone, but here ELEX actually disables healing through healing potions if you’re inside. The HP that you came in with is all the HP you have to play with. Since each action in the danger zone affects what other actions you can take/how much time you have left down the line, you also can’t just savescum your way through, when it’s a bad decision from half a minute prior currently screwing you over. Unfortunately danger zones are not used as often in ELEX as I would have liked despite the engaging challenges they offer. The few danger zones that there are don’t feature combat or platforming that often (even though combat/platforming under debilitating conditions would have made for more interesting challenges). The only negative in the implementation of the danger zones is that each danger zone type (heat/frost/poison/radioactivity) functions the same (sapping your health over time). It's the same thing but in a different skin depending on the biome the danger zone is in. The danger zones could be more unique from each other if each damage type affected you differently as well.

To conclude, I hope this all illustrates the challenges and caveats that come when expanding the surface area of an open world game. While I would have preferred that ELEX’s world was smaller in size, I do not believe it impossible to create a game with a larger world whose progression and balance is still sensible. The only challenge is doing so is whether the developer has the budget and manpower to realize that, which a larger studio like From Software recently set out to prove with Elden Ring (to great success, I hear). If you’re wondering why I didn’t cover other aspects of the game in any detail, it’s because simply I didn’t find them interesting or worthwhile enough to dissect a lesson out of. Others have provided better insight on them than I can.

During the time while I was (procrastinating) writing this piece, ELEX II was released to muted fanfare. Rather than to polish the strengths of the first game, it seems like per nu-PB tradition it’s yet another “one step forwards, two steps backwards” affair. Oh well!

We are all capable arbiters of our own destruction. In the face of trauma, loss, anxieties of the world we chase specters, seeking solace in vacuums where nothing can touch us. But the metaphorical monsters follow, twisted by our own attempts to forget and leaving them in fragments that we are forced to piece together again for any attempt to heal to succeed.

This destruction permeates, festering and swelling until it is our own purgatorial hell. Returnal is Silent Hill 2, it's also Housemarque's past properties, it's also Arrival. It's a weaving gripping story as much as it is a compounding stressful game to play. They're intertwined, for every artifact that saves us is the same one that shoots us down. To gain is to lose, and to lose is to gain. And in that mind-numbing dance we hope that eventually we'll find answers and ASCEND.

But we don't, we return. The choice to journey alone against the dark within is a futile one. We may eventually piece things back together yes, but an outside hand was needed at some point or else the result is the same, the crash repeats. Cyclically. You can help future versions, but those same notes will hurt you too. You are not perfect at envisioning how you will respond to yourself later as much as you can now.

But is that really true? Are we really incapable of breaking the cycle? Perhaps there is a way. Once we've come to terms with our traumas, pieced together things, maybe now the grieving can begin. And then trial after trial, we can come to accept our fractured home and our multitudes, trace them to where they began, and then move on.

There's more to it than I can effectively take away and regurgitate here. Our souls are simply denser than that. Selene's journey is complicated and painful, and crossing every cycle is punishing and difficult. You can choose to remain strong, but the twist is that there's no real destination for you here. This is her story to let go and you can ride it as long as you like.

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I can wax prose like this, but there's simply no way I can do that and comprehensively talk about everything I love here. So this is now when we zoom out, lol. I hope you enjoyed that. As much as Returnal deserves something that considers it in all its interwoven nature, I would like to spend time on just how much it gets right.

Housemarque really just outdid themselves here, something I would've never expected were I following them before this game came out. The sense of scale to where this third person shooter roguelite seamlessly works with its narrative and ethereal elements is incredible!! I enjoyed every boss, each of them forced me to sit still for a moment and understand what I needed to work on and use as soon as possible. Biggest shout out to the fourth boss that really shat on me and said "dashes are not a spammable escape tool. They can be smokescreen to slaughter equally as much as assisting." In other words, sometimes it's better to just WALK. The bullet patterns match this, each of them require different ways of moving, jumping, traversing. The harder and optional minibosses near the end especially emphasize the limits of your toolset. At a lot of points there was a re-evaluation of what my main strategy to traversing the area is. This led to a lot of heart-pounding scrambly moments, and when the roguelite elements showed their ugly face on top of me that only beat me down further. You have to be prepared for the worst case scenario at all times, but you can't afford to stay strictly safe either if you want to grasp victory!!

Also god the aesthetic is so great, I love how Returnal is visually and it never compromises clarity. There are times in Resogun and Nex Machina where I couldn't 'really' see things and felt like I was hit cheaply. Of course it was likely my own fault, but the idea is that the clarity isn't exactly perfect as much as I'm having to adjust my vision for particulars. Returnal sidesteps that completely, just perfect layering. Really doesn't go stupid for the sake of next-gen, and as low a bar that is it gives me a smile! Music is incredible too, and if there's one issue I have it's that the official soundtrack doesn't have all of the music and that makes me angry >:(

I had such a good time here. Not a ps5-seller mind you, there'll never be justification for spending $500+ for one game and that in of itself stops me from shoving this game down people's throats. Fucked up. Even still, I can't stop thinking about this game. I had to finish it today and even still I don't feel like i'm done! I will be returning! If by any chance you can touch this experience please do, I implore you. And to a good rest of the year I pray as well!

Already played this game, but suggested to be reviewed by SunKabir77.

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Ok yeah this doesn't leave much of An Impression nor much to say on it that isn't just a comprehensive rundown :/. It's Hotline Miami, sure, but filtered through its own lens that results in something arguably much more shallow? Fun to play as quick stop and pop popcorn, but story is ironically gestural insomuch that any point it COULD be making about violent video games as a whole and player commentary is ultimately facile and its leading threads don't coalesce in any other real point. I won't say this part is "offensively handled" but it sort of backing a lot of that subtext on real imagery of ptsd, mental health, and cycles of therapy and then rewarding you with some super cool ultra hard boss fight for saying fuck you to your corporate AND government led therapist (lol) is a wee bit uh, well ok then. Was never particularly excited for the dlc or sequel stuff whatever is the state of that now. Credit where it's due, it's a nice crisp presentation altogether (although apparently riding a lot of that backing on games I Still Haven't Played Yet ;-;) and with it I can still remember everything about this game a couple years later in pretty good detail.