cave story is one of my biggest inspirations, and i think the progenitor of my love for idiosyncratic, diamond-in-the-rough passion projects. i'd be a different person without cave story. textual themes and motifs aside, to me this game is ultimately about how cool it is to make art. mash all your favourite genres and tropes together and watch the magic that comes out! i love that more than anything. if i turn my game design brain on, i'd have issues, but who cares about game design when this world is so fucking cool?

...nicalis please fix the challenges on the steam version it's been 13 years

a random whim possessed me to replay this game a couple days ago and i'm so glad it did. i'm a big fan of diamonds in the rough, and this is such a great example of that... the combat mechanics are unintuitive and severely punishing, the platforming is floaty, the plot is esoteric and convoluted, and if you wander even slightly off the intended path everything starts to look like a cheap asset flip.

but like with other diamonds in the rough, you get out what you put in. it can take a lot of good faith and effort, but the reward can be spectacular - cinematic kung-fu fights under frozen waterfalls, creative and original worldbuilding, creating traps for guards with well-placed bodies, writing holes that compel and inspire the imagination rather than break immersion... it's a clear passion project of a game, and i adore it for that, warts and all. an odd, idiosyncratic kind of masterpiece, which might be the most special kind of masterpiece of all

really cool and i love the characters. the visual presentation is incredible, like nothing else! remedy is using its big budgets to push the medium like no other major studio right now, and that rules.

but i still can't help but feel it's missing some of the critical juice that Alan Wake 1 had which made it instantly click with me. i prefer the action-game combat and shooting in 1, where the combat in 2 takes the form of generic survival horror shooting but without resident evil's refinement. the exploration, too, feels underwhelming, because while the environments are detailed and interesting the rewards are abstracted into upgrade points, useless little charms or a surplus of health kits. it's better than Control's tedious "+5% chance to save ammo when shooting a Blumbo" stuff but combined with the slow movement that make detours into bigger time investments, there were many times when i could have explored larger sections of the map and chose not to because i didn't think it'd be worthwhile.

and then there's the story and the mysteries. i liked them, on the whole, and i was compelled all the way through, but i felt like i was butting heads with a couple of mechanics as i tried to piece it together. saga's case board and profiling mechanics are used for a couple of fun moments near the end, but they actively interrupted my attempts to organically piece together the mystery throughout the adventure by making them required to progress. the annoying thing about this is that it makes sense thematically - this isn't my story, i'm not saga, alan wants this methodicalness and he's not a great writer - he delivers exposition in clunky, unintuitive ways, and his characters often speak with the same abrupt cadence as his prose and it's kinda annoying! but it's all intentional, right? can i really criticise the game for asserting its own control over the story, over the mysteries, when that's so thematically appropriate? even if a significant part of the appeal of a mystery story, the number one thing a writer is taught about writing mysteries, is to Show Don't Tell and let the audience infer things for themselves?

i feel like Alan Wake 1 has a tighter grip on its goal. the linear levels, the fewer mechanics leading to them feeling more focused, the single-track story without digressions - it's a funny idea to make a sequel bloat outward with ideas like a vain writer who killed his editor with a light switch, but that still results in it feeling bloated. i like Alan Wake 2 a lot, i think it's better than Control and will be easier for most people to get into than Alan Wake 1 with its rough edges, but it doesn't quite hit the spot like 1 for me.

also saving the ending for your story till the DLC is kinda shit!!

this is not a perfect game. i think it fails in quite a few areas - the themes of light/shadow/darkness and the power of cooperation aren't thoroughly explored, zelda is very sidelined as a character, the post-snowpeak questline with the hidden village and the sky book is a huge pace-killer. the visuals haven't aged gracefully, a couple of bosses are real stinkers, and it's way too easy!

but this game still gets so much right! the cinematic presentation and stellar cutscene direction strengthens the tone perfectly. and that music!! it's not a live orchestra like the later Zeldas, but the breadth of the soundtrack in this game is unmatched outside the likes of 100-hour JRPGs. it's epic. it's Epic!! because of its scale, the tone is able to be managed so perfectly that the comic relief in Barnes and Malo Mart and the Postman still feel fitting where certain tonal digressions in other Zeldas (looking at you, Majora's Mask) tend to undermine the overall vibe. in another game, unmasking Zant's menace as clownish petulance might have come off as diluting the atmospheric build-up of the final stretch of the game, but slotting it next to the (overhated) reveal of Ganondorf keeps things in balance. the story is bigger than just Zant and Midna's battle for control of their world, as it rightly reminds you, and so Zant getting popped like a balloon doesn't feel overwhelmingly goofy - it just adds a bit more texture to the game's overall flavour.

and the flavour of TP's world, too, is so much more refined than people give it credit for. we all love snowpeak mansion, but arbiter's grounds as a haunted prison, the city in the sky as an otherworldly ghibli homage, the goron mines as. mines! this game's hyrule hits the crucial balance between ancient ruins and lived-in homeliness that other zelda games never got quite right (at least for this linear pre-BOTW style). this world and its cinematic ambitions invite you to consider it deeper, and while the depth isn't always there, the texture of its elements is a standout in the action-adventure genre (especially of the time) and the reason this game is a classic imo.

twilight princess isn't the precision and refinement of a fine wine like breath of the wild or a hearty-but-hollow soup like wind waker - instead, it's a full three-course meal, with a couple undercooked ingredients and a couple real juicy ones, cooked to cater to many but still with a care and attention to detail to reward the observant. it's not as consistently great as ocarina or as laser-focused on its core design as BOTW, but it's still a fucking phenomenal game and deserves a higher standing than it currently holds among fans, i think!!