Is it close to the Silent Hills of old? No not particularly.

Does it absolutely stumble on getting across some of its ideas and concepts? Yeah.

Are the chase sequences a bit rough? Yeah.

I still really fucked with this and everything it was doing. It gave me a dose of what I've wanted from Silent Hill for a long time, it had a vision and it sees that vision all the way through while trying to mix things up a bit.

I think it handles its themes of trauma and abuse trapping someone emotionally within cycles of self destructive and self distancing behaviors causing lashing out at anything that harms the ego and whatever normalcy one can cling onto fairly well.

I feel like even if it was a bit heavy handed at times (the beginning really tries to hammer home how depressed Anita is in ways that feel really corny) I cannot ignore the earnestness and the willingness to just fuckin try something here. The art direction, the atmosphere, the music, the tones.

No it's not Silent Hill 3 but it worked for me and captured me in ways that I really didn't expect. That last chunk of the game really fuckin hit me.

it's a sad day for fighting game fans as katsuhiro harada announced the long-running tekken series would be laid to rest earlier this morning. this comes mere hours after news that competitor under night in-birth II sys:celes sold over one birthillion copies, leaving many to question why bandai namco chose to go head-to-head with the anime juggernaut

chaos later erupted at the funeral when kamone serizawa unexpectedly leapt from the casket mid-eulogy. armed with steel chair he wasted no time incapacitating michael murray before removing his shirt, shotgunning several cans of beer, and climbing back into the mahogany box. witnesses say he refuses to leave, stating it "belongs to [him] now"

virtua fighter creator yu suzuki was seen fleeing the scene and while he declined to comment on recent events, he revealed he's been hard at work trimming down shenmue's story and now expects it to conclude within the next six or seven games

when we return we'll have more breaking news on the dark side of accessorizing, the closure of ed hardy, and why some are calling this an unprecedented golden age for planet earth

stay tuned

“I always loved that sound” (Placeholder)

Cooking is a practice that has been deeply linked with culture and tradition. On the first point, cast your mind to how you decide on a restaurant or takeaway, if the question is not framed as Pizza, Curry, or Salt and Chilli Chicken, you are probably thinking Italian, Indian, or Chinese. With regard to tradition, think the obsession with whether or not a particular dish is authentic? Does it use the right ingredients, is it prepared in the traditional way, is it white people spicy or actually spicy. The reality is that our cultural notions of both are a little skewed. Indian cuisine is a term so broad as to be almost meaningless, and most of the ‘Indian Food’ people in the UK and via cultural exchange Ireland are familiar with is actually Bengali food from Eastern India (Ahmed Ullah & Eversley 2010: 77-82). In Venba Tamil food common in the region Tamil Nadu where the game’s primary, programer, and one of the writers Abhi hails from (Ahmed 2021).

On the point of tradition, while some people might act as though there is a classic Tamil way of making Idlis passed down divinely from a single source, but as the primary gameplay of Venba shows it is a practice handed down often from parent to child. As the eponymous Venba points out while deciphering her mothers instructions I don’t normally make them this way but she swears by it. This is the heart of the game for me, deciphering instructions as either Venba or her son Kavin creates an experience of trans-generational connection that I don’t think I’ve quite seen in a game before. The closest would be the ending of Brothers by way of Heaven’s Vault which is a sentence that probably makes sense to no one. This fusion of gameplay with a story about Venba, her relationship with her family, and their relationship with the Canadian country they call home shows a clear marriage gameplay and narrative. A narrative that is not shy about confronting the more challenging aspects of immigrant experience. The difficulty of assimilation, violence, orientalisation, and distance from home are not glossed over.

There’s a real feeling of participation in the culinary tradition, yes of the Tamil people, but more specifically of this family. Going through the labour of cooking, which is a phase that I love from an interview with Abhi and artist Sam Elkana (Ahmed 2021). Only to see the emotion of the following meal. Something made all the more joyous through the stylistic renderings of these dishes and the characters that enjoy them by Ekana, Rae Minos
Danik Tomyn. I do wish more was done with the concept, I was never asked to recreate a dish, internalise any of the recipes, or to understand what dish a character might like. Though it should be stated asking for more is indicative of how I liked what is there.

Venba, is game that is a fabulous window into a lesser known culture of the Indian subcontinent, and the diasporic experience. Ultimately, it pushes out beyond the screen. I am eager to learn to recreate some Tamil style biryani and to learn more about the region because one game could not possibly be the end point of understanding an entire culture. I also look forward to possibly replaying the game with family, because while I am not Tamil and have only lived abroad very briefly, behind the cultural specificities is a story about a mother and family anyone can relate to.


Sources:

Ahmed Ullah & Eversley (2010) Bengalis in London’s East End Researched, compiled & edited by Ansar Ahmed Ullah & John Eversley, Swadhinata Trust https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325145803_Bengalis_in_London's_East_End (22/01/2024)
Ahmed (2021) Venba is a cooking game obsessed with the emotional impact of food
Just about right, Eurogamer https://www.eurogamer.net/venba-is-a-cooking-game-obsessed-with-the-emotional-impact-of-food (22/01/2024)

I really love this game even in spite of the snow yetis. This is the game that introduced the now standard feature of weapons that evolve with use. The game's just bigger in scope compared to the first and the shooting is improved with some much needed features like the ability to strafe while shooting. This game also starts the tradition of a hidden museum that features developer commentary and content that was cut from the game. It's a lot of work, but I wish more games would do something like this.

I see no reason why a short McDonald's tie in game should be as good as it is. I mean it's not perfect or even anything to right home about; besides the music being pretty alright and some genuinely good level design for it's era, but it's far too easy and I felt like there was a little too much going on visually at times so where I started getting a headache. I think having the novelty of playing a McDonald's video game that isn't a horrible slap dashed togather waste of time is enough for me to say it's at least worth a look but other then that it's really nothing special.

you had to be there

when the online wasn't a ghost town it felt like the full experience it quite obviously isn't in any other context. the fashion, the modular create-a-wrestler style movelists, duels; it was delightful, if insanely obtuse in ways it never should've been allowed to be. absolver is a dreamer's game, made with the impractical grandeur of idealists

the dark souls veneer followed by the realization that the single player content was a total wasteland certainly turned some folks off, and it's not tough to figure out why. uncover this shortcut, now fight this boss, now calibrate the north western stance in your cardinal direction combo deck. regular people turned to goop when this shit hit; folks were disintegrated for thinking it's another R1 bonanza. this is a fighting game, baby, or at least the corpse of one

revisiting it now's a bummer. just doesn't hit the same way without player interaction. an extended tutorial devised to usher you toward a wider community that's dead and gone. bones long turned to dust. the fallout 1 death screen where you're slumped in the desert repeating for eternity

ppl talk about when mmos lose their communities, but there's something extra sad about this space + time for me. reaching for the moon, designing a combat system so heavy and nuanced, and then having it relegated to fighting hollows in the undead burg forever. purgatory shit. gustave dore woodcuts depicted this exact scenario and we should've learned from them

true marvel of ungoverned spirit. indie games rarely felt so brazen and optimistic as in those ten minutes in time

simply love this kinda working class industrial horror. starts off tonka souls then pulls the rug out and goes all in on daedalic technomazes, gloomy maintenance tunnels, and the kind of homogeneity that makes for the best kinda fevered n fraught navigation. very reminiscent of early 90s pc dungeon crawling, and very much a product of outsized ambitions and design choices; the kind of thing that punches well above its weight and isn't shy about bringing new ideas to the table. we should be thrilled that a developer best known for sludge like lords of the fallen was capable of this much growth in a three year span. that's fuckin sick dude, good on them

it's a shame no one seems to want to engage with it on its own terms, but the pitfall of wearing the mask of a clone is that you'll naturally be treated like one. there's a question of who's at fault here and to what extent, but the response seems especially heightened when it comes to the souls games. nearly every deviation here is done with deliberate intent, for better and worse, yet nearly all of them are treated as if deck13 misunderstands fromsoft, rather than granting even the faintest possibility that fromsoft's fanbase misunderstands deck13

iframes were reduced to bring a greater sense of dimension and purpose to spacing and positioning. limb targeting and its balance between armoured + unarmoured parts create a risk/reward situation where efficiency and economy are at odds with one another while solving the grind dilemma. guard break and overflow damage penalize poor stamina management. dial-a-combo strings provide situational offensive options and punish mashing. duck/hop reward pattern recognition with stylish defensive maneuvers. fast startups hint to get the fuck out of kissing range. and the list goes on. attempting to untangle the R1/O meta isn't easy (tanimura found that out too) but it's evident most of these choices draw directly from fighting games / 3D brawlers and try to shift the dynamic to one where the entire toolbox is equally utile and necessary. these aren't boneheaded mistakes, they're a conscious uprooting of the established verbset

now that doesn't mean you have to like any of it. you don't!! this isn't even really about whether the game's good or not but the strange refusal to consider other modes of exploring a similar foundation. browsing all the long winded steam reviews started to make me dizzy; all this time and all these words dedicated to an almost intentional misunderstanding of what was in front of them. I have infinitely more respect for the guy who says "naw this feels bad" than the guy who puts on their souls veteran uniform and postures as authority like a hall monitor

starting to wonder if any of these games will please an audience that doesn't particularly want to be pleased. it's very telling that Lies Of P's the standout fan favourite because it's the only one where if you close your eyes you could pretend it was miyazaki; a body pillow for ppl whose most formative life experience was beating the capra demon. even dark souls 2 gets berated for experimenting indulgently and drawing more from fromsoft's naotoshi zin era, so pretty much no one's safe. I don't envy anyone working in this space; you either make Demon's Souls 6 or you have to deal with immovably uncharitable weirdos with literally no interest in making adjustments outside their comfort zone

I guess it makes sense, souls fans always struggled with adaptability

I considered strongly putting together a long-form critique of this game, but the most damning statement I could possibly make about Final Fantasy XVI is that I truly don't think it's worth it. The ways in which I think this game is bad are not unique or interesting: it is bad in the same way the vast majority of these prestige Sony single-player exclusives are. Its failures are common, predictable, and depressingly endemic. It is bad because it hates women, it is bad because it treats it's subject matter with an aggressive lack of care or interest, it is bad because it's imagination is as narrow and constrained as it's level design. But more than anything else, it is bad because it only wants to be Good.

Oxymoronic a statement as it might appear, this is core to the game's failings to me. People who make games generally want to make good games, of course, but paired with that there is an intent, an interest, an idea that seeks to be communicated, that the eloquence with which it professes its aesthetic, thematic, or mechanical goals will produce the quality it seeks. Final Fantasy XVI may have such goals, but they are supplicant to its desire to be liked, and so, rather than plant a flag of its own, it stitches together one from fabric pillaged from the most immediate eikons of popularity and quality - A Song of Ice and Fire, God of War, Demon Slayer, Devil May Cry - desperately begging to be liked by cloaking itself in what many people already do, needing to be loved in the way those things are, without any of the work or vision of its influences, and without any charisma of its own. Much like the patch and DLC content for Final Fantasy XV, it's a reactionary and cloying work that contorts itself into a shape it thinks people will love, rather than finding a unique self to be.

From the aggressively self-serious tone that embraces wholeheartedly the aesthetics of Prestige Fantasy Television with all its fucks and shits and incest and Grim Darkness to let you know that This Isn't Your Daddy's Final Fantasy, without actually being anywhere near as genuinely Dark, sad, or depressing as something like XV, from combat that borrows the surface-level signifiers of Devil May Cry combat - stingers, devil bringers, enemy step - but without any actual opposition or reaction of that series' diverse and reactive enemy set and thoughtful level design, or the way there's a episode of television-worth of lectures from a character explaining troop movements and map markers that genuinely do not matter in any way in order to make you feel like you're experiencing a well thought-out and materially concerned political Serious Fantasy, Final Fantasy XVI is pure wafer-thin illusion; all the surface from it's myriad influences but none of the depth or nuance, a greatest hits album from a band with no voice to call their own, an algorithmically generated playlist of hits that tunelessly resound with nothing. It looks like Devil May Cry, but it isn't - Devil May Cry would ask more of you than dodging one attack at a time while you perform a particularly flashy MMO rotation. It looks like A Song of Ice and Fire, but it isn't - without Martin's careful historical eye and materialist concerns, the illusion that this comes even within striking distance of that flawed work shatters when you think about the setting for more than a moment.

In fairness, Final Fantasy XVI does bring more than just the surface level into its world: it also brings with it the nastiest and ugliest parts of those works into this one, replicated wholeheartedly as Aesthetic, bereft of whatever semblance of texture and critique may have once been there. Benedikta Harman might be the most disgustingly treated woman in a recent work of fiction, the seemingly uniform AAA Game misogyny of evil mothers and heroic, redeemable fathers is alive and well, 16's version of this now agonizingly tired cliche going farther even than games I've railed against for it in the past, which all culminates in a moment where three men tell the female lead to stay home while they go and fight (despite one of those men being a proven liability to himself and others when doing the same thing he is about to go and do again, while she is not), she immediately acquiesces, and dutifully remains in the proverbial kitchen. Something that thinks so little of women is self-evidently incapable of meaningfully tackling any real-world issue, something Final Fantasy XVI goes on to decisively prove, with its story of systemic evils defeated not with systemic criticism, but with Great, Powerful Men, a particularly tiresome kind of rugged bootstrap individualism that seeks to reduce real-world evils to shonen enemies for the Special Man with Special Powers to defeat on his lonesome. It's an attempt to discuss oppression and racism that would embarrass even the other shonen media it is clearly closer in spirit to than the dark fantasy political epic it wears the skin of. In a world where the power fantasy of the shonen superhero is sacrosanct over all other concerns, it leads to a conclusion as absurd and fundamentally unimaginative as shonen jump's weakest scripts: the only thing that can stop a Bad Guy with an Eikon is a Good Guy with an Eikon.

In borrowing the aesthetics of the dark fantasy - and Matsuno games - it seeks to emulate, but without the nuance, FF16 becomes a game where the perspective of the enslaved is almost completely absent (Clive's period as a slave might as well not have occurred for all it impacts his character), and the power of nobility is Good when it is wielded by Good Hands like Lord Rosfield, a slave owner who, despite owning the clearly abused character who serves as our introduction to the bearers, is eulogized completely uncritically by the script, until a final side quest has a character claim that he was planning to free the slaves all along...alongside a letter where Lord Rosfield discusses his desire to "put down the savages". I've never seen attempted slave owner apologia that didn't reveal its virulent underlying racism, and this is no exception. In fact, any time the game attempts to put on a facade of being about something other than The Shonen Hero battling other Kamen Riders for dominance, it crumbles nigh-immediately; when Final Fantasy 16 makes its overtures towards the Power of Friendship, it rings utterly false and hollow: Clive's friends are not his power. His power is his power.

The only part of the game that truly spoke to me was the widely-derided side-quests, which offer a peek into a more compelling story: the story of a man doing the work to build and maintain a community, contributing to both the material and emotional needs of a commune that attempts to exist outside the violence of society. As tedious as these sidequests are - and as agonizing as their pacing so often is - it's the only part of this game where it felt like I was engaging with an idea. But ultimately, even this is annihilated by the game's bootstrap nonsense - that being that the hideaway is funded and maintained by the wealthy and influential across the world, the direct beneficiaries and embodiments of the status quo funding what their involvement reveals to be an utterly illusionary attempt to escape it, rendering what could be an effective exploration of what building a new idea of a community practically looks like into something that could be good neighbors with Galt's Gulch.

In a series that is routinely deeply rewarding for me to consider, FF16 stands as perhaps its most shallow, underwritten, and vacuous entry in decades. All games are ultimately illusions, of course: we're all just moving data around spreadsheets, at the end of the day. But - as is the modern AAA mode de jour - 16 is the result of the careful subtraction of texture from the experience of a game, the removal of any potential frictions and frustrations, but further even than that, it is the removal of personality, of difference, it is the attempt to make make the smoothest, most likable affect possible to the widest number of people possible. And, just like with its AAA brethren, it has almost nothing to offer me. It is the affect of Devil May Cry without its texture, the affect of Game of Thrones without even its nuance, and the affect of Final Fantasy without its soul.

Final Fantasy XVI is ultimately a success. It sought out to be Good, in the way a PS5 game like this is Good, and succeeded. And in so doing, it closed off any possibility that it would ever reach me.

It doesn’t really surprise me that each positive sentiment I have seen on Final Fantasy XVI is followed by an exclamation of derision over the series’ recent past. Whether the point of betrayal and failure was in XV, or with XIII, or even as far back as VIII, the rhetorical move is well and truly that Final Fantasy has been Bad, and with XVI, it is good again. Unfortunately, as someone who thought Final Fantasy has Been Good, consistently, throughout essentially the entire span of it's existence, I find myself on the other side of this one.

Final Fantasy XV convinced me that I could still love video games when I thought, for a moment, that I might not. That it was still possible to make games on this scale that were idiosyncratic, personal, and deeply human, even in the awful place the video game industry is in.

Final Fantasy XVI convinced me that it isn't.

Getting pretty tired of these indie souls games that have no identity outside of being a really bad dark souls with no bells or whistles attached except arbitrarily changing one mechanic to make it even worse. This game might feel worse than Lords of the Fallen, which really just means it's one of the worst feeling games I've ever played. Also in all the time I played the game I never once heard an actual song play and I know this game has music I see that soundtrack but until further notice I don't think it's real actually. Basically we should outlaw indie developers that want to make souls games I refuse to believe any of these are good

showing up to the bank with a note that reads

"darksiders is my favourite 3D zelda"

aghast, the teller knows I can't be reasoned with and Sir Robert Bordens flood my sack

U spend twenty thousand hours dealing with the shitty water controls and the bad camera and the annoying sfx and the fact that u gotta go to mumbo to take away ur power and the cheap hitboxes and the fact that the hub world IS TOTAL ASS and then when u get a game over bc of the cheap hitboxes u gotta go all the way to the start of the castle and u dont ever know where to go. And u gotta find ur way with the shitty water controls to go back where u are. And then the horrible final boss and the only reason i win is bc a big blue dude who youve never met slams into the witch anyway this games great