619 reviews liked by Jackier


Listen, I was a long time Vanillaware ride-or-die fan, but even I couldnt have anticipated the narrative hydrogen bomb they were cooking up in their basement. They pulled what I could only call a “trope blitz” to craft one of the most confusing (compliment) multithreaded narratives Ive ever seen in video games - and while this came at the expense of the actual gameplay, the inoffensive RTS systems are fun enough to toy around with that I didnt mind much.

I had a rough start with Hypnospace Outlaw. The opening hour led me to believe it was first and foremost anti-capitalist satire, and when the game resisted my actions made under this assumption, I was frustrated. The premise alone, sleep being commodified in the name of productivity, sounds dystopian. The tutorial introduces your role as an online moderator, which you perform by reporting violations such as copyright infringement and harassment. You’re told that, although you can submit a report once you meet the report quota, you can earn a cash prize for each violation reported beyond this quota. This immediately brought to mind a similar mechanic in Papers, Please, which incentivizes you to detain people whenever possible for a commission. Sure, in Hypnospace you’re only paid in hypnocoins which explicitly have no real-world value, and sure, there’s no backstory about how I have to feed and house my starving family, but come on! I went in expecting to have my morals pushed and was ready to wield (and abuse) my authority.

That’s not what Hypnospace Outlaw is.

While struggling to deal with the game’s second case, centering around harassment in the teen forum, I was forced to realize what Hypnospace Outlaw was actually trying to do. I’d found a lead about a site called “The Dumpster,” a mean-spirited blog making fun of lolcows. None of what was on that blog was outright harassment – reading between the lines it’s obviously meant to be demeaning and cruel, but the language is mild and inoffensive enough so that it’s following the letter but not the spirit of the law. That didn’t deter me, and I tried to report every single line of text on the site for harassment. But none of them actually stuck – I got told over and over again to stop sending false reports. “But how am I supposed to abuse my authority if the standards for what constitutes a violation are so high?” I thought. “It’s like I really am supposed to act like a regular moderator.”

After that point it stuck. I had been trying to shove square pegs into round holes, but once I realized my place in Hypnospace, I embraced it. I stopped looking at everything as a potential violation and started to lose myself in the different communities and subcultures found on the forums.

Hypnospace Outlaw is pure fun. It’s unrelentingly earnest and empathetic to the people inhabiting its fictional world, and my role as moderator is just a framing device to put me, the player, as a tourist into this world. It perfectly balances an absurd, almost cartoonist tone while still feeling entirely grounded. People are weird! When given complete freedom to express yourself in a judgement-free (or at least judgement-lite) zone, we’re all cringe and embarrassing!

In recent years I’ve been making an effort let myself enjoy things without shame. I’m only 20, so I wasn’t even alive when this game would have taken place, but it resonated with my journey with unrestricted internet access and how I portray myself online. I remember making a Tumblr account at 13 and over-decorating it to make it feel like my own space before feeling so ashamed at how “cringey” it all was that I deleted it before ever posting anything. Even today, I’m always terrified to post my own thoughts and opinions (like this review!) because putting it out into the world and having it be perceived, people forming ideas about me separate from how I view myself, is terrifying. Anything I put out into the world becomes a reflection of myself, and sincerity is terrifying! It’s so much easier to hide behind a veil of irony!

The people of Hypnospace, on the other hand, are so unabashedly themselves. Each and every person’s page is a sensory nightmare of conflicting colours, textures, sounds, and imagery. But it feels so personal and so earnest that I can’t help but smile anyway. That’s admirable, and something I want to work on myself.

It’s kind of funny then, how I went in expecting this to be mean-spirited and cynical, only for it to instead be a love letter to the internet and those that put a piece of themselves online. I don’t think I could have had this same conclusion if not for my faulty first impression of Hypnospace Outlaw.

Arkane are masters of the 7/10 stealth shooter. Somehow, skipping the live-service game they were presumably forced to make by publishers, they have only ever released 7/10 games. It's honestly impressive.

The good news, this game is jank. It's one step removed from Deus Ex in how clowny you can get with the engine, there's a fine layer of "this doesn't feel like it works right..." to basically every element of the game, in a good way. This, combined with the almost Hitman-like approach to level design makes the game actually do a good job of creating your fun as you pilot your clown of an assassin through each level.

The bad news is like, everything else. One thing I've come to truly hate in games like these is the pacifism v violence conflict. This game is basically screaming at you to be a nice guy and play pacifist stealth, but its just so dumb because in like every stealth shooter, you end up not using a solid 60% of the game mechanics, doubly so in this game because using your cool mobility in combat would be sick as hell! If you were incentivized to do so in any case.

The story is some nonsense about like revenge idk it doesn't matter--Hitman don't need a story beyond the levels either. It tries to do something slightly deep by making the non-lethal options for the bosses of each level fates worth than death, but its really hard to care when no one has any personality and they all look like shit lol.

I don't even think the setting is particularly cool, it just feels like a dingy city with mild steampunk aesthetic and a random elder god watching it. Which like, the literal last game I played was Sona-Nyl of the Violet Shadows and buddy--this ain't no Sona-Nyl.

idk there isn't much to talk about. Do you like 7/10 stealth shooters? That's what this is!

Came back to this after years because I was craving a silly little idle game where you check and see what happens every so often and god, I love these little guys. I love the goofy ass special cats and their dumb pun names. I got all the mementos and the gallery images, although I do kind of wish there were more items to buy after a certain point...

I guess that'll be for Neko Atsume 2! I can't believe it. It's Happening. Gaming is back.

Just like the first Metal Gear Solid, this game was a very profound experience, and whilst it can get very confusing at times, the overall story is always engaging and I loved seeing all the new ways the game managed to completely change the way I looked at the events of the game, with the ending cutscenes being a lot to take in at once, especially since they go on for like half an hour, but still make me satisfied with what I played.

Gameplay is also a massive improvement with pretty much anything that made the first game feel outdated being gone, so the game as a whole feels as good as any modern game to play, and older features like the fixed-camera aren't even noticeable due to how well it controls.

Whilst I would've preferred to play as Solid Snake for longer than the prologue, I actually really enjoyed playing as Raiden, he feels like his own character and the more the story progressed the more he fit into this bizarre world of Snake-clones and vampires, and I look forward to seeing him again in MGS4.

Overall, Metal Gear Solid 2 is a really great game which has aged amazingly, and whilst the games are getting progressively more confusing with their stories and long cutscenes, I still really love playing them, and I look forward to making my way through the rest of the Metal Gear games.

This review contains spoilers

This game is like kojima giving fans everything they want but crossing his arms and doing it angrily. Oh? Oh u want to play as solid snake again? U thought raiden was lame? Ok, here, you’re snake and he’s old and lame and has back problems and raiden is a badass lightning ninja cyborg now. Remember snake’s girl from mgs1? Poopy pants Johnny just married her. He’s not as good at sneaking as u are, player, but he is nice. It’s no accident that every other character ends the game dancing and chilling at a wedding together and snake/player is wasting his short remaining days being exposited to. Spending more and more time being stuck within the metal gear story, milking and draining every bit of information from it until eventually the player hates it. The game gives you fanservice the same way eating lasagna every meal for every day wil give u lasagna poisoning. I feel it’s a critique of the culture where everything is theorized and discussed and answers for every mystery are demanded. The game’s so stuck within itself that every boss is a remix of an old one. You literally press x to see pictures of whatever metal gear moment this scene references. I’m not qualified at all to talk about meta commentary and stuff but there’s a part in this game where snake asks why they kept big boss’ body alive. She says “because people need their hero to stay forever” and looks directly at the camera. I don’t think it’s really an avoidable topic when discussing this game.

I love Kojima but this is prob his most flawed dialogue and exemplifies a lot of problems I have with his later games stories. This and peace walker are the only mainline mgs games I’ve never replayed. There’s obviously too many cutscenes and the gameplay segments are mediocre after the first act. The game’s psych meter system is an interesting concept to shift the physical health first aid care system from mgs3 to mental health and make it more about ptsd, but it does quite literally nothing with it. The therapist character on your codec doesn’t even give you therapy she just says to wait in the corner until ur stress level goes down. Or says some shit like “the boss you’re fighting, unhappy armadillo, is unhappy. According to psychology, this is caused by lack of happiness. Good luck snake.” The bosses are terrible and the boss roster themselves have no personality (unless you like their wattpad trauma backstory that is omnisciently told to you by the gun merchant after you beat them) which is such a downgrade from every other game’s boss rosters, every single one of which I would have a drink with. I don’t even drink but I would defile my sacred mouth with the poison that is alcohol just to make fatman or sniper wolf or the pain happy. But there’s much to appreciate with what this game does.

“Don’t waste the life you have left fighting”
=
“Stop playing this video game 😡”

Maybe I’m completely illiterate or I’m projecting but my interpretation is valid and yeah. Also the ray fight and the ocelot fight are amazing. The end. Sry for the serious review.

in terms of accomplishing what it sets out to do, I think a short hike is as close as it gets to being a perfect game.

This review contains spoilers

I've always been a man who is honest about the games he plays. No matter what and Pony Island is no different.

I don't understand why Pony Island is so beloved. It's a 2016 game, yet it feels like a game from 2010 that's only here to go with the meta concept and nothing more. The puzzles are boring and tedious, the gameplay is also boring and tedious. The story is simplistic and also very boring. For a game about an arcade machine from Lucifer, it somehow manages to be the most boring and frustrating game I've ever played. Perhaps that makes sense, but this game obviously wasn't made by the devil. It was made by Daniel Mullins.

Now, I don't hold ill will towards Daniel. Of course not. Sometimes good devs make bad games. Even Pixar has a few bad movies in their catalog. Solipsis from Dread X Collection 2 was a great short game from Daniel and I hear he's doing a lot of good things with Inscryption, yet this game feels it went home about the idea of it being meta and nothing else to bring the concept forward. It feels like Daniel had a great idea, yet had no idea how to execute it well compared to other games like Spec Ops: The Line or OneShot.

There's a scene in this game that takes your Steam friends list and uses it against you. It's actually a really cool scene, but then it's ruined by what I can assume to be a Skype notification sound. Playing this game in 2022 makes a scene like that hilarious given how Discord wiped Skype off the face of the Earth.

All in all, Pony Island was a miserable experience that I had the misfortune of playing. In the words of Masahiro Ito: "It's terrible so much."

Pony Island walked so that Inscryption could run. Some very fun moments here, but the core gameplay isn't nearly as fun as Inscryption's card game and a lot of the notes are similar. Had I played this back in 2016, this would almost certainly be higher rated.

Pony Island trotted so Inscryption could gallop.