Bio
It's easy to be a naive idealist.
It's easy to be a cynical realist.
It's quite another thing to have no illusions and still hold the inner flame.
It's easy to be a naive idealist.
It's easy to be a cynical realist.
It's quite another thing to have no illusions and still hold the inner flame.
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GOTY '23
Participated in the 2023 Game of the Year Event
N00b
Played 100+ games
Busy Day
Journaled 5+ games in a single day
180
Total Games Played
005
Played in 2024
109
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My adventure with retro-FPS games started with the innocent, but hyper-fast Post Void, which is available on the Steam store for less than a tenner. For the price of a panini from polish Żabka, I received a crazy, roguelike, almost surreal combination of Doom and Hotline Miami, in which you have to defeat 11 narrow, randomly generated rooms in a row, filled with an increasingly crazy set of enemies and colorful wallpapers reminiscent of 1970s kitsch.
The plot is simple - after an inhuman headache tears you from the peaceful sanctuary of the Void, you must carry your disembodied head through a tragedy of violence and chaos confined within four walls as its life force pours out of it with every passing second.
Post Void is like a drug from a cyberpunk movie. It spins, distorts, flashes and screams with colors. In short - it ruthlessly attacks your senses and lulls your attention with a hypnotizing artistic direction. It only takes ten seconds to give you motion sickness, then a migraine... and then you magically get the hang of it and you're thrown into an addictive loop.
The game took me 5 hours and is quite difficult to master, but if you use your head and analyze your mistakes during hundreds of failed attempts, you can beat it. Under the influence of adrenaline, wiping cold sweat from forehead and staring manically with bloodshot eyes, but you can.
For fans of: ADHD, psychedelia, speedruns, surrealism, the 70s, FPS genre, short and fast games and men in black.
This game is fucking metal. Like, Voivod-level metal. And if you showed it to a Victorian child, it would die instantly.
The plot is simple - after an inhuman headache tears you from the peaceful sanctuary of the Void, you must carry your disembodied head through a tragedy of violence and chaos confined within four walls as its life force pours out of it with every passing second.
Post Void is like a drug from a cyberpunk movie. It spins, distorts, flashes and screams with colors. In short - it ruthlessly attacks your senses and lulls your attention with a hypnotizing artistic direction. It only takes ten seconds to give you motion sickness, then a migraine... and then you magically get the hang of it and you're thrown into an addictive loop.
The game took me 5 hours and is quite difficult to master, but if you use your head and analyze your mistakes during hundreds of failed attempts, you can beat it. Under the influence of adrenaline, wiping cold sweat from forehead and staring manically with bloodshot eyes, but you can.
For fans of: ADHD, psychedelia, speedruns, surrealism, the 70s, FPS genre, short and fast games and men in black.
This game is fucking metal. Like, Voivod-level metal. And if you showed it to a Victorian child, it would die instantly.
Mind-bending, clever, fun and surreal puzzle-game without a story. The main theme of the game is conveyed through pictures with simple, yet brilliant messages.
In that sense, puzzles can be analogy for our daily life and our struggles. "Taking the first step can be harder than the rest of the challenge.", for example; or "When you absorb your surroundings, you may notice things that you didn't see before.". Often these were so clever, that I straight-up laughed, thinking that the game just taunts me.
Visuals are pretty dated and considering the fact it has stylized art style - I think this is pretty shocking. Still, I am not playing the games for visuals. Visuals can only enrich the experience, but never let it down or destroy it.
This game showed me that I am not stupid, I just tend to rush through the things too much and I should often slow down. Immerse and analyse.
I liked it! It requires a lot of outside-the-box thinking, but it pays off pretty well.
My only critique of this would be that sometimes it is too cryptic. It doesn't say how map works, only suggest how it might work. Also, because of this whole work with the pictures, you might lose the sight of your sole purpose - beating the game. This whole time I thought that you beat the game with collecting all of them, which is not true. You have to escape the chamber.
Ending is such a bullshit. They really didn't have a better idea, did they?
In that sense, puzzles can be analogy for our daily life and our struggles. "Taking the first step can be harder than the rest of the challenge.", for example; or "When you absorb your surroundings, you may notice things that you didn't see before.". Often these were so clever, that I straight-up laughed, thinking that the game just taunts me.
Visuals are pretty dated and considering the fact it has stylized art style - I think this is pretty shocking. Still, I am not playing the games for visuals. Visuals can only enrich the experience, but never let it down or destroy it.
This game showed me that I am not stupid, I just tend to rush through the things too much and I should often slow down. Immerse and analyse.
I liked it! It requires a lot of outside-the-box thinking, but it pays off pretty well.
My only critique of this would be that sometimes it is too cryptic. It doesn't say how map works, only suggest how it might work. Also, because of this whole work with the pictures, you might lose the sight of your sole purpose - beating the game. This whole time I thought that you beat the game with collecting all of them, which is not true. You have to escape the chamber.
Ending is such a bullshit. They really didn't have a better idea, did they?
From a purely gameplay perspective, Celeste is an extremely well-thought-out and almost perfect game. Its responsiveness, difficulty and creativity are simply unmatched. The best games in the history of the precision-platformer genre can learn from it.
Unfortunately, I'm a aspiring writer and I approach a medium like games based on the following principle: 65% plot, world and narrative, 35% gameplay.
Celeste is a typical, "cool", modern quirky game about trans girl Madeline's depression, anxiety and self-acceptance. Its main themes and message are really beautiful - "remember about yourself and take care of yourself!", or "sometimes self-improvement is necessary in order to avoid hurting others."
Nevertheless, I think that the narrative of this game is quite shallow - the game uses trivial metaphors and does not explore such serious themes well enough, and it cannot hide behind minimalism like Journey. It's not bad per se, it's just simply overrated.
It does it story in most surface level self-help book way possible.
In some way, it's the result of the fact that I simply feel like I've outgrown such quirky games and since the release of Undertale, I've been starting to roll my eyes at the sight of them.
Regardless, it's still a game bordering on greatness. It's just missing that "something" to complete the whole picture in satisfying manner. And since its level-design is integral to the story and vice-versa, I think that a rating of 8.5/10 is fair enough in the perspective of not having this icing on the cake.
Unfortunately, I'm a aspiring writer and I approach a medium like games based on the following principle: 65% plot, world and narrative, 35% gameplay.
Celeste is a typical, "cool", modern quirky game about trans girl Madeline's depression, anxiety and self-acceptance. Its main themes and message are really beautiful - "remember about yourself and take care of yourself!", or "sometimes self-improvement is necessary in order to avoid hurting others."
Nevertheless, I think that the narrative of this game is quite shallow - the game uses trivial metaphors and does not explore such serious themes well enough, and it cannot hide behind minimalism like Journey. It's not bad per se, it's just simply overrated.
It does it story in most surface level self-help book way possible.
In some way, it's the result of the fact that I simply feel like I've outgrown such quirky games and since the release of Undertale, I've been starting to roll my eyes at the sight of them.
Regardless, it's still a game bordering on greatness. It's just missing that "something" to complete the whole picture in satisfying manner. And since its level-design is integral to the story and vice-versa, I think that a rating of 8.5/10 is fair enough in the perspective of not having this icing on the cake.