No spoilers in here but just need to get something out of the way first, I HIGHLY recommend playing Lobotomy Corporation first or at least watching the cutscenes (if you're a coward/j) since it genuinely adds so much to this game it cannot be overstated enough. Yes the gameplay in Lobotomy Corporation also adds to it but enough of that you know why you're here. No spoilers also means I cannot delve too deep into why I love this game so fucking much but trust in the process!

This game almost made me fail my finals, rewired my cerebral cortex, took away my motor functions and the ability to feel fear. This a game whose difficulty spike is so vertical it makes economic inflation seem tame, this game will NOT babysit you, it expects you to read the entire Bible at the age of 3 and then go fight a group of bears with your bare hands. All this accompanied by such intricate gameplay mechanics, an absolute banger of a soundtrack and a story that is so convoluted, bizarre and most of all: intriguing that you'll think you hallucinated how it still ends up being so disturbingly coherent at the end of it.

But lets get into the premise now, this game NEEDS you to read, like a lot. The setting? Have you ever asked yourself what if humanity fucked up so bad we thought letting mega business corporations dictate our lives would be a good idea? Well here it is, the finish line to that fantasy. The setting takes place in the titular continent sized City composed of 26 distinct districts each controlled by a mega corporation and because of humanities ingenious idea to let said corporations dictate their lives the world is, in a nutshell, divided into the super fucking rich and the super fucking poor. Which one are you? I'll leave that up to the imagination. This game quite possibly has my favorite world ever made in a game accompanied by stellar world building to back it up, every single section of the game sheds more light onto the world and its inhabitants. The poor live in a lawless hellhole known as the Backstreets while the rich live in places called the Wings under the direct jurisdiction of the corporation controlling them. The poor? Well in classic fashion they simply don't care! Happiness? Dreams? Stability? Sorry buddy we don't have that here. Murder? Organ harvesting? Cannibalism? British people? These are the horrors waiting for whoever is unlucky enough to live in the Backstreets (most people).

The game begins through the eyes of our good buddy Roland stumbling into the titular Library while looking for a sandwich, getting made into a kebab by the director and then healed to then be a slave. This could be you someday at your local library! The synopsis on this sure explains it pretty clearly I just wanted to be funny but yes this is the end of the review so might as well give a warning to NOT look up anything about the characters, all info you need is neatly presented to you in a controlled manner and kept in the game itself to view at your own leisure. Now go play Lobotomy Corporation so you can hop on peak fiction! This isn't a request, its an invitation.

When Diddy Kong defeats a boss, he simply celebrates, but when Donkey does the same, he turns to the camera and gives a thumbs-up to the player. That Donkey himself could have slain that bird or beaver or giant oil drum is beyond question: what he's proud of is the fact that you've done it. This is his Country, the way he's chosen to live. Donkey himself dug those tunnels, laid those minetracks. He travels on them daily. The player's role is not to guide him, but to be guided, to be ushered through pain and rare triumph into engaging with the world as Donkey Kong does.

The massive sprites are not simply an effort to show off the rendering technology Rare had available to them, although the results of this still look quite good on an appropriate TV. They serve to blinker the player, to make threats invisible until they're almost too close to avoid. This is how Donkey Kong experiences the world. He has no need of foresight: he simply responds. Many video games are simply ignorant, but Donkey Kong Country is unique in its articulation of a truly ideological anti-intellectualism.

There's something somber about the last moment of the game in this context. Donkey Kong claps and gives the player a final thumbs-up, before Diddy interrupts him with an act of slapstick violence which he quickly reciprocates. The sublime moment, the connection across the screen, is shattered, and Donkey returns to his role as cartoon ape as surely as you resume your role as man.

Aside from this, it's a complete slog. British people cannot design videogames.

Due to this being nearly lost media it's hard to judge it based on gameplay but the story is really good. It even has the darkest ending in any Xeno game. I just finished playing the demo of a fan remake of this game and while it may not be the original, I can definitely say it gives off a similar impression to how I imagined the game played like. It's a very short demo but I enjoyed it. So much so that I'm excited for the full release whenever it is ready. Despite being an old mobile game, I may actually end up loving this.

Once you get past the fact that this game is... not a very good sequel to the first AITSF, it still has the same strengths at its core. The characters are extremely entertaining, the dialogue is funny, and of course the mystery part is always thrilling. AINI takes its concepts further than the first game at the cost of, at least for me, being a whole lot more difficult to follow as well, but once it finally clicks it goes BALLISTIC. I still prefer the first AITSF for being an overall more digestible narrative but considering I have both at 5 stars it's not by a significant margin.