ludic poetry tbh...every room a precisely chosen word in a line, every dungeon a verse, full of rhymes and rhythm and melodious surprises. the line between downtime and climax feels far less pronounced then in the first two installments, instead channeling a near-endless flow state thats not so much barrelling as it is Sickly and Congesting. very unpleasant and deeply compulsive to play, and absolutely the most i have ever felt Involved with one of these games moment to moment (and easily the scariest time, if that wasnt clear!). i struggle with whether to give this the edge over 2, but theyre clearly in the same ballpark...for all ive said 2 is i think still on the whole the more Unpleasent experience simply because perhaps no other games story has so effortlessly channeled Here's A Bunch Of Things That Would Suck If They Happened To You, with both a gentle human hand and fist of divine pseudo-justice. if anything, 3 makes me feel more at home, its terror lovingly vindicating. the campaign is half Having A Bad Time Walking Home and half You Can Never Go Home Again...every moment of destabilization feels like a cathartic acknowledgement of the sinister underbelly to things that people by and large Pretend Are Okay, with notes specific to my life in ways that r obvious if u know me. cheryl is on edge and looking over her shoulder and has been for years before being plunged into the events of a silent hill game...running on messy strength pulled from the experience of living in a world hostile to her Body and Self (at least insofar as she is in control of both). just rly wonderful stuff...almost good enough to take my mind off recent silent hill news!!!

One of THE games and also one of the few cases where I genuinely think that it's near impossible for me to say anything especially new about it, but god, this game is so good. The atmosphere that this has is particularly interesting, with locations that often feel like sparse game constructs that are only just beginning to take shape as actual locations, but are still forming all the finer details to truly take it to that point. It sits in this middle ground between having naturalistic worlds and abstract, geometrical artifice populating the landscapes, with even the most well-established aesthetics being coupled with strange floating boxes or blatantly mismatching elements, ultimately embodying a lot about what I love about this era of 3D platformers.

Another bit of magic that this game has to me is how its movement plays into its level design. Super Mario 64's character control feels sublime with how cleanly it flows into itself while never making the process of traversing the environment an unintrusive exercise when you're first playing. Mario feels heavy, he's got a lot of jumps that require a semblance of commitment once you begin, there's some precision to be found in stringing everything together as well, but once you begin understanding how to control him, you truly understand just how powerful you are. The level design plays into this fantastically for the most part, with this constant feeling of "if I was just a bit better and more confident at this game, I'm sure there would be a ton of ways to get up here" in most stages, making them feel so mechanically dense, with the potential to learn a lot of basic, tiny skips just through experimenting and messing around with bits of geometry that look vaguely scalable, because there's so much room for this everywhere that you're bound to find a few if you're at all adventurous.

I might not enjoy every stage here, since some do end up being a bit too skeletal for my liking (not too fond of Dire Dire Docks and Snowman's Land mainly), but this game is magical, it's foundational to so much of what I adore and still somehow also has some of the best movement in any game I've played despite also being the blueprint of a lot of it. Also, the experience of playing as a little guy who makes silly noises after literally anything you do is so powerful once you've actually played it yourself, seeing gameplay videos does not convey how funny it is for this to happen for an entire game.

neglected to log until i got the 100%/true ending to see if it would change my (already positive) perspective in any major way, and the answer is, kinda??? coming to this in a world where the superficially similar Tunic already exists and is one of my favorite things ever, the easiest description i had for this was that it was like if tunic was more focus on being a pure action game, designed around deliberate one-way progressions thru specific combat encounters. im a lil mixed on how this affects the postgame...in a way, these spaces dont feel made to be run thru back and forth over and over in search of secrets. but if its not as mindblowing as tunic, theres still tons of DELIGHTFUL revelations and large scale puzzles...many of the games most memorable moments are in the postgame. but even just judging the main campaign, its a lovingly symmetrical and well-manicured set of challenges with an essentially perfect combat system...took a bit to get used to the lack of targeting, but honestly it gives u way more precise control over ur positioning. character designs and charms are also uniformly incredible, and the ghibli-esque comforting melancholy is a wonderful emotional vibe. zelda dna is an easy way to put any game in my comfort zone, and this was an especially wonderful version to come back from work and relax into. i just like little guys with swords in big worlds

nothing embodies this experience better than the 1-2 punch of the loopy arthouse perfume commercial intro followed almost directly by the mcdonalds ass "595839122 deaths served worldwide" advert in majula

on one hand we got a game with the foresight of a haruspex that envisions the ever-escalating arms race the series would find itself in and tries to preempt it with radical mechanical changes, and on the other we got a game that thinks Rat With a Mohawk is a really sick idea for a boss

this thing is the living end; the result of a wild disregard for anything fans consider sacred and a critical eye that found dark souls' core pillars wanting. given the chance to do a remix/remaster they chose to ignore all feedback, double down on all the bullshit, and name it SCHOLAR OF THE FIRST SIN like it's a terrence malick movie. the haters never had a prayer against this kind of power

oscillates between achingly beautiful and sandy petersen's work on doom II. presents characters as haunting as vendrick and lucatiel then goes and reskins dark souls' most emotionally resonant encounter as ripper roo. both modern fromsoft's most melancholic, human game, and the only one where you're forced to play as an absolute mutant

I'm at the point where I'm glad the lighting got downgraded before it came out. it should be fucked, it needs to feel sickly and eroded and wrong. iron keep has to be something you can't understand, and the transition from shaded woods to drangleic castle has to be as disorienting as possible. every time you question the earthen peak elevator I only grow stronger and more insufferable

this is the response to a call no one made. it's gotchas behind gotchas behind gotchas, noble failures, bandai namco PTDE marketing quotes, and fromsoft's most indulgently experimental design since demon's souls. it's the bondage gimp door, the gender swap coffin, npc invaders modeled after the most dickhead player behaviour possible, and the cumulative psychic damage of the frigid outskirts

it's fighting the rotten four times to skip half the game, becoming drangleic's next top model, and having NAMELESS CHAD kill you while you idle in iron keep. it's backstep iframes, powerstancing demon hammers, unbelievably good pvp, and yui tanimura's masterful turn as director of the dlc trilogy

talk all the shit you want:

a lie will remain a lie

perhaps the pirates of the caribbean game ive been needing, in terms of buoyant swashbuckling anti-authoritarian escapism ofc but also just the Physicality of ecstatic and yet inherently comedic action spectacle. so many combinations of actions and fast reversals of fortune that are just Inherently Amusing!!! and the written jokes aint bad either, on the whole they give the game a much more lighthearted and breezy tone then the movies im comparing it to and it works perfectly well for this,,,i can easily picture a worse version, but its all exuberant action movie giggles completely sold on the gravity of how Awesome ur character and her accomplishments are. just pure joy!!! and one of the best swordplay games ive yet come across, as fantastic as the main crowd control stuff is i was always happiest to just sink my teeth into a good one-on-one duel...lots of promises fulfilled here

it started out with a kiss, how did it end up like this...

its so weird and hard to try and explain whats good about echo because its surface level is equally ridden with humble shortcomings and overwhelming power...the prose is not anything special, the presentation is often in the novice land of weird sprites and endless kevin macleod music (though the cgs tend to be wonderful at least) theres a couple route-specific flaws, and maybe a couple ideas or plot beats have been Done Before if u care about that stuff. but its just so clearly one of the greatest things ive ever experienced in any medium, and could only exist in this specific form as a visibly amateurish gay furry itch.io cult classic...a sprawling, ambitious, colorful, comforting, gutting, endlessly fascinating generator of Thoughts and Feelings stepped in the kind of emotional truth you can only get from a niche product whos very conception will grant it the safety of probably not penetrating beyond its niche. but maybe thats a shame...echo is difficult to recommend, but i Do want more people to know about it, if for no other reason then its going to inspire at least one of them to take its lessons and go back something possibly even better...tho nothing could ever replace this

i am under no illusions that i will write a definitive review of echo, especially in the spoiler-free fashion i keep my stuff in, but after having spent literal years now reading this (i read my first route in late 2021, and took massive gap breaks between all the times i slowly returned to chip away at it), starting in one of the most tumultuous times of my life and ending it what has been one of the most peaceful times of my life, there are some things is especially have to commend...i owe it that much for its companionship

for me, echo's greatest strength, and its greatest thematic idea, is its commitment to the long-term effect...a relative de-emphasis on the individual moment-to-moment reading experience as anything amazing in isolation, and ability to weave these seemingly non-amazing scenes into something unspeakably identifiable and powerful. identity , for the game, for its routes, for its characters, is rich and multifaceted because it exists less in any big gestures and more in an increasingly dense personal history spent interacting with them. part of why the game took so damn long for me to playthru is that it has a kind of naturally rising emotional difficulty...the more routes u do, the more emotional baggage u have with the characters, the more u have to reckon with when they are onscreen , consciously and subconsciously. its not the the innocuous becomes massive in hindsight, it mostly stays innocuous...but it takes on a different color and flavor, becomes more specific and distinct

none of this is unique to echo, hopefully it could be applied to most good longform storytelling. but i do think echo has a uniquely powerful and steady hand in this department that resonates in myriad ways...its characters overwhelmingly traumatized queers with varying backgrounds of abuse, attempting to not be defined by the dry and brittle embrace of the town they spent their whole lives in...a struggle that often fails because the past cannot be truly left behind, and when actively denied manifests in secret subtle horrible ways that are now beyond your understanding because you have refused to reckon with it. the characters are their experiences, every moment of their lives enabled by every previous moment of their lives...there is no way to un-form themselves, who were formed in great pain and a deeply unjust world.

it is in this way that this being not just a gay game but a Gay Furry game is so fucking important. being queer is inherently traumatic in the cishetero patriarchal world, inherently abusive...even if not overtly, then internally, raised in an abnormality in a world that doesnt even teach u to recognize urself as one, leading to potentially years and years of ur identity and attractions being isolated from urself as u subconsciously recognize they are not yours. furries are overwhelmingly queer, and why not? u spend so long separated from urself, that u have to look in unexpected places to find it in a comforting and authentic way...why not cute animal people?

echo's niche is not tangential to its power (tho it is refreshingly un-exhausting about the logistics of its animal people world, leading by almost entirely intuition with a couple moments of playfully leaning on the unmovable concession that is the central aesthetic identity), it is Exactly Why i dont care if another vn ten years ago did similar things with anime girls or whatever. this is a frank and harrowing and emotionally complex discussion of internal and external queer trauma for an audience that will inherently understand it, without having to do any pandering or explanations to those who dont. this is why the game constantly blurs the line between romanticism/eroticism and horror, rather then being a DDLC style bait and switch where one becomes the other. this is why every single one of the deeply lovable incredible main characters could be convincingly argued to be a terrible person, and why theres no contradiction in that when the game asks u to love and accept them anyway. this is why every route has revelations that re-contextualize the entire game, with a full workable picture denied until the very end (and even then, in a world so vast, whos to say what we're still missing?). this is why the shit with sydney's dad is the way it is.

because if queerness is beautiful, yet also inherently traumatic, then that trauma can be, from some specific angle and trick of the light, beautiful as well...or at least, it can still produce a beautiful being, of which i have known countless...we are our experiences, especially our ugliest and most unjust ones. we cannot undo it, and yet we are worth something anyway. this is the revelation, and reorientation of how i see myself, that has allowed me to like myself for the first time in my life

i hadnt had this realization when i started echo, finishing it now id say its been the dominant pattern in my thought for the past year or so. echo is a space where i have returned like an intellectual checkpoint. am i being as kind and understanding to my younger self and their mistakes as i am to sydney? am i keeping a good holistic view of all of this enlightened traumaqueery to make sure im not making any excuses for genuine abuse, from or against or outside myself? has my acceptance turned to passivity? has my fear of passivity overturned my acceptance? have i been remembering that my worth and energy comes not from easily listenable or observable traits but something far more ephemeral built up by individual points of view choosing to spend time with me? echo has been equal parts challenging and comforting, realist and idealist, indulgent and thoughtful, spiraling and perceptive. at least in this stage of my life, its difficult to imagine being "done" with it , or having learned all i can from it. but even if i move on eventually, it, like everything, will remain within me. i could not be happier to have it here

kinda difficult to parse...oftentimes literally (busy artstyle and cacophonous sound design made things unpleasant more often then id appreciate) but also just a strange compromised vision that was perhaps lucky enough to land on some extremely striking decisions in the concept stage. even more lucky is how much i value Being In A Place in video games, perhaps more then anything else in the medium...if nothing else, rapture is an enduring Video Game Place, its garish advertisements are fun to navigate by, and just about every level is a well defined and satisfying Enough contained exploration box. the game plays all its cards on making sure u know How It Feels To Exist In Rapture, and the imprint is strong...definitely something i will be able to recall well into the future. randian aesthetics always make for great visual maximalism as huge egos splatter their wills all over the canvas of the world. the whale-like gurgles of the big daddies and their animal-like patterns of behavior are mesmerizing to be in the presence of. the environmental storytelling cracked open the brains of a bunch of teenagers in 2007 who didnt even know u could Do stuff like this in games. and water is so pretty!

everything else i am mixed or conflicted on. the actual play experience is fairly exhausting, yet weirdly frictionless...extreme player fragility even up to the end of the game intersects with effectively consequenceless death, and the resulting chemistry robs the game of some of its potential color. there are many tools by which to strategize, many resources to manage, but the economy is deceptively forgiving (often swinging wildly between loaded and starved and back again in the matter of a half hour) and effort towards strategy effectively only buys you some saved time from running back from a vita chamber and throwing yourself at the same enemy over and over in a battle of attrition. i can like this sort of messy systems design, and its not like theres no logic to it, but i kept wishing for either a more refined high octane action game or a slower more strategic survival horror thing...system shock 2 may still have the best rhythm for this particular vision. the gloppy soup here of not quite action, not quite survival horror, not quite immersive sim is a real bummer for me considering i usually go for this kinda weird spicy Not Totally Functional Stuff...often i think it just lacks texture

the narrative stuff is a lot more focused, but it also leaves me a little cold. i think if the game manages at least one salient critique of its randian society its that andrew ryan replicates all the bureaucracy and state sanctioned violence of the world he claims to reject , under the guise of privatization. it jabs right at the heart of what is so unworkable about hypercapitalism that posits itself as "anti status quo"...it is still creating and enabling and Requiring all of the same behaviors that lead to statism or "corporatism" or whatever the boogeyman is. this is also potentially resonant with the big cheeky flashy metacommentary on lack of player agency in games...the unquestioned illusion of freedom , but entirely within man-made confines. whether this parallel is exactly Meaningful i dont rly know, but its at least a resonance

this does all, of course, run up against the games actual desire to get lost in the illusion, to have freedom and player choice as earnest back-of-the-box features. its debatable whether it succeeds, but it is an intended directive...i suppose that also brings up the fact that u are playing thru a cartoonishly anarchic rapture, where the actual hypercapitalist moment of everything being authoritatively controlled by those who can afford to control it has relatively passed and now everyone is Running Loose and Killing Eachother and Taking The Crazy Drugs That Make U Crazy Wooooo Spooky!!! as someone Fond Of Anarchism i have my own objections to this, but i guess it drives home how in its basest elements, bioshock cant quite achieve full aesthetic unity, at least in my eyes. youre supposed to be helplessly strung along by higher powers without ur knowledge, but also play in a freeform way that is unique to you. ur supposed to be horrified at the sins of rapture, but also bask in the looting and shooting and consequence-free chaos its ruins allow. ur supposed to rescue all the little sisters to demonstrate ur selflessness, but it ends up better for you personally in the long run. ur supposed to think about faults in our current society, but also critique rapture exclusively in relation to our current society, as ryan's foolish hubris leads him to believe he could escape the world

i love a good contradiction, the resulting sparks of the clash can be rly vivid to me. but theres not rly a mystery here or any questions to ponder deeply. the gameplay is incoherent because its at the behest of what a AAA game in 2007 was expected to do to sell, and the politics are incoherent because for ken levine imagining a world unlike our own is a strictly fictional exercise, one to warn us about extremism in any direction (a thread in all of his shock games). rapture matters as nothing more then it matters as a Cool Place To Shoot Things In. the illusion of freedom, of choice, of critique, is more comforting and sellable to a mainstream audience then any truth of those things. i suppose all that matters is that the self-deception is a conscious choice by the individual. andrew ryan would approve.

This one was a weird game to properly wrap my head around when trying to pick apart my feelings on what makes it tick. There are so many weird, clashing elements at play that simultaneously serve to make for something borderline unplayable and deeply interesting. Almost every misstep ultimately contributes to another aspect of the game in an evocative way while playing nicely into the whiplash and incongruence that the Kingdom Hearts series thrives in, managing to tell its best story in the process. Despite the cutscene collection getting the main gist of things across, the amount that playing the game properly adds to the nuances of each character also cannot be understated, it should be obvious, but playing the game is the preferable option to watching a truncated recap of events!

Despite my immediate praise for the game, one that extends to the core gameplay, it’s also not hard to understand why Days is so consistently maligned. There are layers to the idiosyncrasies that the player will be interacting with constantly, with each of them requiring you to meet the game on its own terms, lest things get extremely stilted and a bit difficult to fully digest. The pace of the combat is often very slow and simple compared to the PS2 games, which is to be expected given the fact that this is a DS game, but the way that its handled is pretty effective for the most part, despite a couple of sticking points. To accommodate for the simpler, slower combat, the enemies have likewise been simplified, yet are still made interesting by their mechanical extremities being emphasised. Elemental weaknesses are far more devastating in this game, and enemies will often only have one or two moves they can use, but they’ll instead be used in a synergistic way with other heartless. A big example of this is the role of the loudmouth equivalent in KH2 compared to in Days, where it’s now almost exclusively a healer for the enemies, instead of being a standard enemy with healing capabilities as well, now making them a constant priority, especially given how much slower and weaker Roxas feels than Sora. Enemies such as the barrier master have similar qualities that ultimately contribute to the majority of heartless types feeling distinct and memorable, rather than visually different pieces of fodder. The change in dynamic that the player has to get used to is one of the biggest reasons why I’ve seen a lot of dislike for the game I’d wager, as another change that was made here is that enemies will often have a lot more HP than might seem reasonable, with even the basic enemies often reaching over a health bar by the end of the game. If not properly approached, this would take an excruciatingly long time, because the game pulls no punches in making you feel weak and stupid the very moment you stop listening to it.

The panel system is key to this entire bit of the game working so well for me, as it’s the element in place to make following exactly what the game wants you to do a bit trickier. This essentially turns your inventory into a big tangram board, with each ability, piece of equipment, item and even level up being a piece to put into this inventory grid. It’s set up in such a way that you’ll be having to sacrifice some aspect of your character if you want to ever excel at anything and forces the player to plan in advance before entering a mission, using the little tidbits of information provided to make assumptions about the threats that will be faced in each individual task. If you don’t engage with this system to its fullest extent, there will be frequent situations in which you’ll be left taking far longer than feels good to accomplish your objective. This layer of strategy that gets incorporated into the game is a big part of what makes me have such a great time, it feels great to tweak your build to accommodate for the task ahead, and a lot of instances of things feeling too slow ultimately feel as if they boil down to poor strategic choices, and then it’s just a matter of if I accept this or back out so I can focus even more on the specifics that acted as a roadblock. It also has that fun little wrinkle where level ups are not a strict upgrade in every scenario, due to the space they take up that could theoretically be applied more effectively in particular cases, I just have a lot of fun when even such basic things are used as resources rather than a strict number upgrade with no strings attached sometimes. While it’s true that a lot of this could have functioned equally as well with something like an AP system, where equipping things cost a certain amount of points to use, I don’t care, this system is fun and gives the game a bit more personality!

Despite my appreciation for the ideas behind this dynamic, it doesn’t always pan out either unfortunately, some enemies really do just feel too tanky, the carrier ghosts being the most egregious example. The problem is at its worst with the boss fights however, since literally all of them other than the final couple are genuinely horrible in one way or another. The more simplistic enemy design philosophy that the game sticks to falls apart when approaching these much bigger encounters that feel as if they require a bit more to them to make them feel especially interesting to interact with. Fights like the Infernal Engine or the Guard Armor feel too simplistic and easily exploitable just by fighting normally, while fights such as the Antlion require certain precise movements that are a pain to do with the somewhat clunky controls the game can have, but the worst of it comes from the way that certain fights seem to revel in the idea of wasting your time. There’s a reason why the Leechgrave and Ruler of the Sky are considered so insufferable, and that’s just because of how long a fight with them can take even when you’re aptly prepared due to mechanics that make getting any real damage a total slog. It’s a shame because visually, both of these are some of the coolest looking heartless in the series, but a big portion of their fights respectively are either taking out a lot of really tanky enemies, or slowly chasing it down just to get a couple of hits in before it goes out of reach yet again. It’s such a shame to go through the storyline of each location only to have it culminate in something so consistently underwhelming, seeing awesome designs before being struck with the realisation yet again that the ensuing fight feels like garbage (once again with the exception of the final couple, which are genuinely incredible).

The narrative of the game is where it all really shines to me though, being by far my favourite storyline of any Kingdom Hearts game, contributing a lot to my appreciation for a solid handful of the Organisation members while also telling a poignant journey in its own right. I genuinely do not think I’d care for a few of the Org XIII members without this game, as it gives characters such as Saix and even Xemnas a lot more presence to elevate them beyond being functional but not super interesting to think about on a level deeper than “this guy is intimidating”. The idea of Nobodies and their supposed lack of hearts and emotions has always been an interesting concept in this series and this game sets out to explore this rather than leaving it as interesting in a purely conceptual way, showcasing the different ways in which the members process this facet of their existence hinting at how their pasts had shaped them along the way. It also just makes me feel really, really sad for Roxas for a multitude of reasons, dude just can’t catch a break and this is one of the few times where a game has made me cry as well, especially when even the moments in life where he’s shown the most kindness are still undercut by so much bullshit that it ultimately feels deceptive towards him and a bit of a farce. Even the structure of the game plays into this, with the nonstop, frequently insignificant missions thrown your way further reinforcing how miserable working for the Organisation was. It’s not handled perfectly, as there’s definitely a point in the middle third of the experience where it gets a bit overly tedious even when looking at the game in the favourable light of it being intended to reflect how Roxas should be feeling so upset about having to do such menial nonsense all the time, but its nonetheless really interesting to me and is essential in its role of providing space in between the big events so you can better feel things such as Saix’s increasing hostility towards you, or the developing friendship of the ice cream trio.

358/2 Days is a weird, flawed game without a doubt, but it’s also a game where a lot of those issues contribute to something else in a positive fashion. It’s the ideal sort of game for the DS, it understands that trying to replicate the feel of KH1 or 2 on the system would feel rough, and instead makes a lot of concessions to craft a slower experience that requires a lot more forethought and planning as opposed to leaning more into the execution of a lot of these plans. It doesn’t always work, but it does so often enough to make for a great baseline with some wonderful texture in how a lot of these systems feel to utilise. The game also made me cry so like, yeah. Certainly not a game for everyone, but it’s a game for me.

BORN TO FUNNY
WORLD IS A TURNABOUT BIG TOP
West Clownadelphia 2006
I am Moe Curls
410,757,864,530 GROWN MEN ATTRACTED TO A 16 YEAR OLD