ELOH is a puzzle game that has you redirecting tiny projectiles around the screen in an attempt to have them hit a target. Each stage has a different starting layout where there are various types of blocks scattered around that you can reposition in order to achieve that goal. Gameplay is also accompanied by calm BGMs, and every block, when hit, produces a tone, giving something of a musical texture to the experience.

In fact, ELOH is reminiscent of puzzle games like Auditorium, only perfectly deterministic, i.e. much better. There's 84 puzzles to solve, and the challenge level isn't very high, which makes it best as a game to unwind to. I remember buying it way back, in a lazy Saturday morning, and binging it the whole way through.

For three dollars, it's basically a steal.

If flOw tried to have engaging gameplay but mostly managed to be a game where the fun is in the aesthetics, Flower just embraces that part of the experience from the get-go, and winds up a much better game in the process. Flower puts the player in control of a gust of wind carrying petals whose job is to run through flowery fields, flying over flowers to bloom them. As more flowers bloom, the land becomes more beautiful and more paths open up. That's basically it.

flOw's beautiful visuals and sounds are back with a budget this time around: Flower is a game to play with headphones on to relax, just quietly appreciating not only the idyllic scenery and the beautiful soundtrack, but the sounds from the gentle rustling of the grass and the musical tones produced by each flower. One downside compared to its predecessor, though, is that the motion controls are slightly more annoying this time around, as maneuvering in a 3D space with the Sixaxis makes it super easy to overshoot targets.

There are six levels to play, but aside from the environments and time of day, not much changes between them. Like with flOw, Journey it is not, but if you need something pretty to look at for a few hours, Flower is one of the best possible picks out there.

In flOw, you play as a microscopic creature swimming in the ocean. Your objective is to move deeper underwater while eating as much food as you can. That food is found both in plankton floating about, as it is in other waterborne beings trying to do the same as you. Some will be much larger, others, much smaller than you, but nevertheless, every one of them is a potential food source that you should work to attain while not becoming their prey yourself.

It is a strikingly simplistic game, and purposefully so: it was born from Jenova Chen's (yes, of Journey fame) master thesis that dealt with Flow theory and Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment, both of those being concepts that are very important to the experience of playing games. To give a brief summary: Flow theory is the idea that, for us humans, when we're performing a task, we can be in multiple states of mind depending on the difficulty of said task: if it's too hard, we become frustrated; too easy and it becomes boredom. However, if the difficulty is just right, we enter a state of satisfaction called the Flow state, which is conducive to keeping doing the same thing.

Games often count on the Flow state to keep us going, and it's easy to see where DDA slots into this idea: if the game can dynamically adjust itself to match its player, making it so they're never stuck but also are never stomping it, it would, in theory, create a more satisfying experience. This has been experimented with since videogames became mainstream consumer products, but would really pick up between the sixth and seventh generation of consoles, where games had become reasonably complex that there were multiple variables that could be tuned invisibly to the player, adjusting the experience.

Famously, Resident Evil 4 (2005) used such a system, and that game was moderately well received. It kind of had its fans, and possibly influenced the industry for years after its release. The system looked at the player's performance in terms of accuracy and damage taken as well as the items they had in stock, assigning a score that then affected the number of enemies in encounters as well as their level of aggressiveness. Dying repeatedly would lower this score, though higher difficulties would prevent the score from going down too far -- Professional would lock it to max at all times, so there was no DDA. It worked so well that Resident Evil 4 (2023) still uses more or less the same ideas, and that's maybe the best game of 2023.

Discussing these concepts is unfortunately far more interesting than discussing flOw itself. flOw is fine: it stood out as an inventive title back when downloading games on a console was new, and its geometric, shimmering visuals accompanied by the calm ambience and echoing tones carried the experience. Even the motion controls, which are a bit shoehorned, become natural after a while since the creatures twist around so gracefully. It bears saying that they do make it hard to maneuver, which feeds into the game's actual problems.

In regards to its theoretical goal of maintaining a Flow state through DDA, flOw falls on either side of the curve most of the time. With no set goal or true failure state, there's little to strive for more than the aesthetics of a large creature, so one's either bored or entertained by something other than the challenge level. Besides, since threats mostly come in the way of aggressive creatures who maneuver much more effectively than yours, it's tough to feel legitimately challenged: most "deaths" will come from being suddenly zerg-rushed without much of a chance to react.

To be fair, there is a bit of variety in the form of different playable creatures: the "snake" can swim faster, the "jellyfish" can spin to lure prey, the "manta" can dash forward, the "electric eel" can paralyze prey to consume them as they're defenseless, the "predator" will lunge at enemy weak points, and finally, the "man-o'-war" can shield itself, then bash enemies to stun them for a bit. Most abilities are not super useful due to the controls, except for paralysis, which is brutally overpowered. Aposematism, yo.

It's a cheap and great looking game, though, and if all you want is to burn a few hours looking at pretty pixels, by all means, go right ahead -- flOw is a great pick. But in the year of 2024, players who hear of the game from publications from its time of release will be confused as to why it garnered such relevance back in the day.

Deus Ex is considered one of the great classics of PC gaming: its original release was way back in the year 2000, and to this day, it still has its fans. It is even said that whenever you bring up the name, someone reinstalls that game. Standing on the shoulder of that giant, Deus Ex: Human Revolution is... not like that. It's a revival that's as close to a reboot as you can get without actually rebooting a series, reusing some of the setting but having a different tone, story and characters, as well as a different approach to game design in general.

And it is a fascinatingly okay game -- as close to the definition of PS360 AAA slop one can get, minutely designed from the ground up to impress a new generation of players while feeling as sterile and anodyne as possible. hbomberguy did a phenomenal dive into the troubled history of the game's development, which you should watch if you have three hours to spare, but the basic gist is that the change of developer to Eidos combined with a set-in-stone development blueprint created a game that's certainly enjoyable, but oddly underdeveloped in certain points and unambitious in others.

In the world of Human Revolution, human augmentation is a reality, with people being able to enhance or even replace their limbs and organs with machines that offer greater functionality. You might think this would be an idyllic world, where our physical bodies and their limitations don't matter as much anymore. If you do, you're probably new to cyberpunk. Hi. Welcome. Hope you enjoy your stay. And remember the keyword: "capitalism". Earth in HR has been ravaged by mega-corporations and is suffering the effects of extreme pollution and global warming, all while its people agonize under crumbling governments and widespread poverty. To make matters worse, augmented people, who don't always have a choice in getting augments, need a regular intake of a medicine called Neuropozyne, an expensive patented drug that forces many into crime, prostitution and indentured servitude to obtain it.

Get it? It's a metaphor. Writers from Eidos knew authors who used subtext and considered them cowards. The game uses augmentation to create parallels for many issues that affect modern society, from racism to healthcare, from abortion to the housing crisis, weaving its dystopian future into quests, logs and even conversations between NPCs on the street. This extensive and blatant criticism of late-stage capitalism made it even more amusing that Mankind Divided was the one accused of veering the Deus Ex series into "social justice warrior" territory. One has to wonder if those people just started blasting from minute one in HR, ignoring every single line of dialogue in the game.

However, as much as I would like to call those people illiterate, which, to be fair, they probably were, the main story in Human Revolution is conducive to such an approach. Even though the worldbuilding is relatable and easy to get lost in, the main narrative does not explore those themes nor claim that much depth. You play as Adam "I Never Asked For This" Jensen, the head of security for Sarif Industries, that being a company that specializes in augmentation technology. Shortly before revealing to the world a breakthrough that would have revolutionized augmentation science, Sarif's HQ is attacked and most of their head scientists are killed, their research being destroyed in the process. A near-dead Adam is pulled from the rubble and is submitted to extensive augmentation surgery to restore his body's functions. Six months later, he returns to Sarif and begins investigating the attack.

It's not that the main story is bad -- far from it, it's exciting and high stakes -- but instead of focusing on the sociological aspects that shape the world or that led to the great conspiracy that resulted in the attack on Sarif, it chooses instead to focus on the personal stakes certain characters have in it, and the further one goes into the game, the less interested it becomes in developing its world. Many fascinating facts and events go completely unexplained, the plot zooming past them without as much as an in-game file to read on. The final segment is obscene in this regard, presenting an unbelievable contraption that had been teasingly namedropped throughout the whole game, then never discussing what it is or does, just having the player shoot at it.

Again, it's not that it's bad, but it feels directionless and unimaginative. In that sense, gameplay fares somewhat better, but not by much. Deus Ex: HR throws nostalgia out the window, taking inspiration not from immersive sims, but from modern AAA first-person games. At its core, Human Revolution is an FPS, and a competent one at that, but an immediately noticeable difference is that, while it is possible to blast your way through enemies, Adam dies just about as fast as they do, and so the levels are designed in ways that make stealth almost always the better option, there always being at least one path that avoids confrontations entirely.

This is something Human Revolution doesn't get enough credit for: stealth is fluid and effective, and it's also a bit of a puzzle in itself. In so many games that try to give players options, levels are designed in ways that stop short of having signs that say "this way to Sneakville, that way to Combatland" above each obviously designated path. In contrast, areas in HR are more open and coherent, requiring that the player study each environment and plan their movements adequately. It's still not immersive-sim levels of freedom, and you're still basically being led from one room to another, but it does a fairly good job.

What isn't as great is... basically every other system that isn't "sneak" or "gun". There's a skill tree that allows Adam to improve or add to his augmentations -- already getting completely disconnected from the worldbuilding -- that is in theory supposed to reinforce the openness of the game, allowing the player to develop Adam in ways that better suit their playstyle. In practice, the sheer importance of certain skills and the constant need for exp steamroll over the roleplaying and drive any sort of decision-making. In fact, a lot of the game is spent in Adam's Breaking-And-Entering Simulator 2027, where he just ignores his mission to break into every apartment, open every vault and read every email simply because it gets him to level up faster.

This is to say a lot of points will be put towards lockpicking/hacking and social minigames, which are all basically memes at this point. These are the bits of the experience that feel the most unambitious. Each side game is functional and even fun at times, but also feel disconnected from the rest of the experience and could very well have been excluded from the game at no significant loss. The social battles are the most irksome, as the need to record multiple different lines and paths a single conversation could take seems to signal high effort, yet the system itself is simplistic and uninteresting.

Social battles are still not the worst offender in terms of gameplay. No, that honor goes to the one type of section that has been talked about to death, which is, of course, the boss battles. There's some neat ideas surrounding... one of them... but it's incredibly odd that these made it past any design stage, as they're such a brilliantly stupid idea. A forced boss encounter is a quick way to piss off every type of player: stealthy players will have zero lethal weapons on them, meaning the boss must be beatable using only things found in the arena. This, in turn, is a middle finger to shooty players, who will feel like their preparation was completely unnecessary and they could have just McGiver'ed something on the spot and forgotten about their guns. It's a highly polished mess.

And what better way is there to summarize the experience? There is stuff to nitpick about in Human Revolution for days, but in all of them, the level of craftsmanship shines through. It's a disappointment, not in the sense that it's bad, but in the sense that it's fine, and could have been so much more. Again, I recommend the hbomberguy essay for the full context.

If you know anything about Deadly Premonition, you must know of its cult following and that the game is often considered the definition of "so bad, it's good". What you might not know, without playing it yourself, is that it's more of a case of "so good, despite being so bad". When people say Deadly Premonition is bad, they mean it: anyone exposed to it for more than half an hour will begin to wonder how it even passed console certification, what with its constant stutters as well as sections with sustained framerates of 10 and under. For no apparent reason, too, since it looks worse than a lot of PS2 era games.

Sound is another consistent issue. There's no lipsyncing whatsoever and the cutscenes are audio mixing nightmares: characters muffled voices fade in and out, often much lower than the sound effects or music blaring in the background. Subtitles are a must, but be prepared to see many typos. All this to bring to life gameplay that's like a bad RE4 clone: same-y enemies, odd QTEs and a weapon reticle that slides all over the place define the experience -- and that's if you're playing on console, because on PC, you need mods to even make the game playable.

With all these things in mind, why would anyone want to play this game?

Because there's nothing else that features its particular brand of weird.

Deadly Premonition was originally named Rainy Woods, an adventure game that started development as a PSP title but was officially announced as a PS2 and 360 game in 2007. Only one trailer of that game was ever shown, however, and the striking similarities to the 90s TV series Twin Peaks, caught the eyes of many. The game was shelved shortly after, however, due to technical issues with cross generation development. In fact, it's said it was almost canceled a handful of times during its six years of development before, somehow, it finally came out for the 360 in 2010 under the name Deadly Premonition.

The final version of Deadly Premonition changed several scenes and characters from Rainy Woods so as to avoid getting the good ole' Cease and Desist from our pal David Lynch, but even so, its inspiration is still clear as day: just like Twin Peaks, Deadly Premonition uses a murder as a hook to draw the viewer into a surreal atmosphere, one with quirky characters through whom an ever evolving web of mystery is formed. The story follows FBI Special Agent Francis York Morgan (but please, call him York, it's what everyone calls him) to the small rural town of Greenvale, where a gruesome murder of a young woman just occurred. Believing this case to be related to others he'd been investigating, York sets out to discover what truly went on in the town.

York's introduction is largely reminiscent of Dale Cooper driving towards Twin Peaks, except where Cooper is obsessed with coffee and constantly talks to a mysterious Diane, York is a chain smoker who indulges in long conversations with the mysterious Zach. Don't ask him about Zach. A car accident and a combat tutorial later, we finally reach Greenvale, where we're exposed to more of York and to the townsfolk themselves, and all of them are peculiar in some way, not in a horror sense, but in the sense that all of them have at least one screw loose. Their participation in the main story varies, but all of them have their own day-to-day schedule that leads them through the town, and the player can visit and interact with them at their leisure while neglecting the investigation completely.

Yep, Deadly Premonition is an open-world game where time continuously runs and NPCs have their own schedules, and while advancing the story does require that York visit specific places between hour A and hour B of the day, most of the time, the objective can afford to wait till some other in-game day. Having a town where the player was free to pursue their own goals was considered a pillar of the experience by the dev team, and it's why they made it so the various NPCs around town will hand out dozens of sidequests through which not only can York get powerful items and equipment, but also, the player gets to know each character better. This is where the game was the most successful: Playing Deadly Premonition will make one wish that Twin Peaks had been a video game, and that it could have taken its time with numerous events and extensive dialogue for each of the town's weirdos. Deadly Premonition revels in that feeling of being lived in, characterizing each NPC in intearactions carried by phenomenally confident and cheesy voice acting.

The main story also takes a page from Lynch's work in how it makes ample use of the surreal and the unbelievable. A frequent setup is having York enter a normal-looking building and seeing it transform into a dream-like -- or nightmare-like -- environment, but only when he's by himself. Moreover, York's profiling technique is akin to having visions, making it even harder to draw a line between what's real and what's not in Greenvale. In this department, however, Deadly Premonition is better enjoyed oment-to-moment instead of as a whole. While the individual scenes and setpieces are often incredible, especially during the game's more climactic moments, the overall plot disappoints, featuring weak twists, being somewhat distasteful on a few fronts and closing up with a shoehorned conclusion.

Speaking of shoehorning, it's finally time to talk about the elephant in the room, which are the Other World exploration sections. They're fine in regards to what the game's original idea was: that of an adventure game where survival was the focus, not combat. There was a decent effort put into level layouts and aesthetics, and the inspirations from other more prominent survival horror are clear. But in the world of AAA publishing, games aren't allowed to be simply fun. In an interview with Polygon, Swery65 had the following to say about Deadly Premonition's combat mechanics:

"We might have been able to create much better combat, but that wasn't important to us. I'm OK with people not liking that part of the game." In fact, Swery says an early version of the game had no combat; it was added later at the request of a publisher who told them it would not sell in the Western market if there weren't guns.

While the game's laundry list of technical issues can definitely be pinned on the inexperienced team, combat feels like an afterthought because it is an afterthought. There's an infinite ammo version of basically every weapon, allowing the player to effectively bypass any resource management, and enemies got repeatedly nerfed with each rerelease of Deadly Premonition so the combat sections would go by faster. Some of the game's original vision even survives in the current version in the breathing mechanic: when R2 is held down, York will hold his breath, turning himself invisible to enemies. This is hardly used outside of the Raincoat Killer sections, but it's a remnant of how encounters were meant to be dealt in Rainy Woods: through stealth instead of through force.

Would that we got Rainy Woods instead of Deadly Premonition. The game would probably still have been a commercial flop, but it would have at least lived to its full, weird potential. As it is, Deadly Premonition is a tantalizingly unique but unpolished gem from the PS360 era held back by technical issues and publisher meddling. If you love Twin Peaks and/or the thought of an unapologetically corny survival horror plus life simulator experience appeals in any way to you, do check it out.

As a sidenote, should you find yourself collecting the in-game trading cards before the end of the game, do not read their flavour text. They contain massive spoilers. No idea why they thought this was okay.

Due to me not being a fan of Contra, I had very mild expectations for the new DLC, which turned out to be a boon because Operation Guns definitely has a lot to offer.. There's plenty of new characters and weapons that play very differently, and a lot of these weapons use base game accessories to evolve, which improves the game's balancing.

I really enjoyed the new stages, too, especially the bike one. It's interesting to compare this DLC to the Among Us one, because while in that one, the crossover is mostly for aesthetics, here, the dash of Contra they added does bring a certain SNES flavour to the game, what with the new power ups and the boss battle and such. I daresay this might be the best VS DLC yet. Folks at Poncle still got it.

To cut straight to the point, Anodyne is bland. But it’s a particular brand of bland that mostly indie games from the early 2010s tend to be, back when Braid, FEZ and the like showed that there was a market for indie games, but also when indie devs didn’t use to be as skilled and game-making tools didn’t use to be as good. Because of that, rarely did a project enjoy both a crystal clear vision and the craft to make it. Since the bar was much lower back then, however, we'd see games with this inherent lack of cohesion becoming popular.

And that pretty much summarizes what’s wrong with Anodyne: the game opens to protagonist Young waking up at the Nexus, a mysterious place with gates to other places. He obtains a broom, with which he is able to dispatch enemies, and soon after meets the Sage, who explains that Young is the hero who must seek the Briar to save the world. He then moves on to a highway that gives way to a house in the middle of a field, where he meets a friendly face. This is ten minutes into the game, and already, the experience is being pulled into so many different directions.

The character’s choice of weapon is assumed to be makeshift, but this is never remedied as the world moves further into the more fantastic areas. The broom thus sticks out like a sore thumb from the beginning of the game to its end, and the same can be said for the game’s areas, which are jarringly disconnected and violently clash with one another: the Nexus is a distant, futuristic world connected to the rest of the world through literal dimensional gates; the highway, if stripped of video game elements such as locks and chests, could have been from the real world, and the fields are a few houses short of the archetypal video game village.

But if one could defend the game saying that these elements foster a sense of mystery and unease to be worked on later, this defense is immediately thrown out the window by the awful dialogue and side-characters. There are multiple structural and presentational issues one can bring up, with one of the developers themselves doing a fascinating post mortem on the game where they dive into this issue and more. The NPCs all read as too whimsical, disconnected from what’s taking place in the world, and whatever additions they might be trying to bring to the narrative ultimately fall apart under the scarcity of interactions and the lack of context behind their overly cryptic lines. They do have a role and a specific meaning to Young, but it’s near impossible to derive it without working backwards from a conclusion.

Besides, the attempts at establishing a mysterious atmosphere and tone are immediately torn apart not by a human NPC, but by an inscribed statue that is always behind the Sage, mocking him and whatever he says, how he’s not an elder, how his lines are cheesy… it's the dated brand of gratuitous, self-aware humor where the videogame mocks itself that was all too popular in the previous decade. "I am not like the other girls games", says one of those games. The fact that one can contrive an explanation for why the statue does what it does is rendered largely irrelevant by the fact that the Sage is the first character to be met – the self-deprecating irony is front loaded by the experience and undermines any point the meat of the text is trying to make.

The lack of cohesion continues as we head into the game's mechanics, which copy 2D Zelda, but not very well. Traversal is something Zelda does exceptionally well, managing to both sell the idea that the overworld is like a real place and that the player is in control. Right off the bat, Anodyne uses hard transitions between zones, thus playing at a disadvantage. This could be remedied by adding a world map or using landmarks to help the player orient themselves, none of which are present. Worse is that areas are gated by colored keys, which makes it very transparent that the game is leading you by the nose. It’s a small thing, but it makes a world of difference: Zelda gates parts of its map through its many key items, creating an extra step in the rationale of figuring out where to go. When the player figures out they can use x tool in y way to open a new path in z, even though the designer planned for it, the player feels smart, like they solved a puzzle on their own.

Why doesn’t Anodyne use key items in the overworld? Simple: it doesn’t have any, which then compromises the design of the individual levels. A major pillar of dungeon design in Zelda is that the dungeon is recontextualized by the item obtained within it: the player must first learn to navigate the maze without the key item, then with the key item, understanding which new possibilities it opens up. Anodyne, instead, falls back to obstacle courses with locks and keys, resulting in same-y, unenticing levels where there's a lot of busywork and no payoff to be found. Even the boss battles at the end are just a silly damage race one hopes to be over asap.

Right, the combat. Or rather, the mechanics as a whole: Anodyne is a janky game. It was far worse before the Remastered version was released, when there were so many bugs the game barely held itself together, but even the remaster doesn't fix core issues with the game. Using the broom feels stiff, and so does jumping. Fighting and weaving at the same time? Forget about it. This is why so many boss battles are reduced to damage races. But because those elements alone are also a pain, screens that employ any variety of stage elements generally begin with the player letting out a deep sigh.

And then there's stuff like the collectible cards, which make zero sense… but in the interest of not simply dragging an indie game ad eternum, let me wrap this up with some things that do work: the pixel art visuals are decent and could pass for an early SNES title. The music is… forgettable, but not terrible. The final boss is somewhat inventive, and could shine in a game with better controls, and the Swapper obtained right before it is a fascinating idea that could shine in another tile based game that dared to use it.

…that's about it. Anodyne is in fact a great descriptor for what ends up being a soporific journey through the magical lands of The Land. Despite being cheap and having once seen its time on the spotlight, Anodyne is a relic of the previous decade that's not worth revisiting.

Can it still be said that detective games are "seeing a resurgence" when the last several years have seen so many great games in the genre? Heck, Return of the Obra Dinn is already nearing its six-year anniversary. Maybe it's becoming a cliché to underestimate what has become, once again, a beloved genre. And you would think, with all of those releases, that the genre would become established at one point and stop presenting any surprises. Then a game like Lorelei and the Laser Eyes comes around and upends that expectation.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is... for one, a game that doesn't really wish to bog itself down with explanations. It's a mystery that maximally respects the player's intelligence, laying out breadcrumbs and letting the player reach conclusions on their own, something that begins with its very introduction: selecting New Game immediately gives the player control of the protagonist besides their car, presumably having just arrived at their destination. Where is this? When is this? Who are they? Why are they here?

I don't know, buddy. Fuck around and find out.

It won't take long for the player to reach Hotel Letztes Jahr on foot. The most succinct way to explain the hotel is this: think of the architect that designed the Resident Evil mansions. Imagine they were hired to design a hotel, and were paid up-front in pure cocaine. Hotel Letztes Jahr is a veritable labyrinth, filled with locked doors, secret passages and obscure texts, and the amount of puzzles per square meter crammed into it would make even Hershel Layton blush. This is where the meat of your time will be spent with Lorelei: figuring out how to navigate the hotel and unraveling whatever dark secrets it hides.

And hide it does: from corporate dealings to conspiracies to an outright murder, there's a web of events that soon spirals into surrealism, as life and death, fiction and reality are overlaid, and twisting, impossible spaces exist in the most unexpected of places. Although not explicitly a horror game, here's a spicy dash of horror to Lorelei and the Laser Eyes's ambience, this unrelenting atmosphere of dread and mystery enhanced by the stellar sound design and striking bichromatic palette. In my review of 1000xResist, I mentioned how refreshing it is to see an indie game that deals so well with the limitations of its team and budget in creating great visuals: that can also be said about Lorelei, even though both experiences are drastically different.

And what horror game is complete without lots of in-game files to read? And make sure to do so diligently, as this time around, they're not here just for flavour, there is going to be a quiz on this. As a detective game, Lorelei is meant to be played with pen and paper on hand: the game invites its player, explicitly and implicitly, to draw conclusions about the hotel and the elaborate narrative surrounding it, and very often, the use for a certain piece of data will be unknown at the moment it's obtained -- in fact, one of the earliest puzzles rewards something whose meaning and use is only made clear in the final moments of the game. This means the opposite is also true: some puzzles appear early and stare the player in the face, unsolvable until much, much later on.

Yet, despite all that complexity, one of Lorelei's most outstanding accomplishments is the balance of its difficulty: even with all the surrealism going on, the puzzles largely avoid Moon Logic, remaining grounded by the information, characters and motifs the game is built around. It's common to hear players come out of it noting that they never had to rely on guides to find their way, a statement that echoes my own experience. At the same time, no solution feels particularly unearned: even for the more straightforward puzzles, where it seems like the solution is being given verbatim, there is always another step, and some degree of logical reasoning to fully complete it.

The designers also achieved something rather elegant that will probably go unnoticed by most players -- at least, those who only do a single playthrough. A large part of Lorelei's puzzles have random solutions. The rationale for deriving the solution is always the same, but the puzzle itself has moving pieces that are guaranteed to change between playthroughs, thus changing what the correct answer is. I was pleasantly surprised, when gunning for the game's final achievement, that my notes from a previous playthrough were almost entirely rendered null and void -- I hope this means I can replay the game, more or less fresh, in a few years.

As far as 2024 is concerned, however, were it not for the fact the latter half of the year is absolutely stacked with promising games, I'd preemptively declare Lorelei and the Laser Eyes my game of the year –- it's just that good. A must play for fans of puzzles and mysteries. As an addendum, the fact that Simogo jumped from Sayonara: Wild Hearts straight into this is… my god. What incredible range.

Long ago, in the world of Picnic, a world that was then monochromatic, a magic brush sprung forth, allowing its wielder to bring color to the lands and happiness to their people. Ages passed since that day, and pass did the brush, hand to hand, every few years, to a new artist courageous enough to bear the responsibility of wielding it. In the present, the one holding the brush is none other than the talented Chicory, a rabbit who spent years studying art and training under the previous wielder.

It is in this scenario that you, the player, enter the story, taking on the role of none other than... not, actually, Chicory. You play as Chicory's janitor, a small dog who... definitely, uh... janits... or something. The wielder lives in a big tower, after all, and someone has to clean it. And so, our unremarkable pup is going about their unremarkable day, when suddenly, disaster strikes: all of a sudden, the world loses all of its color. Scrambling to find the wielder and get to the root of the matter, the janitor finds not Chicory, but her brush, and dares to try painting with it. With Chicory still MIA, the accidental new wielder finds themselves in the eye of a storm, as a mysterious threat looms over the land of Picnic.

Chicory isn't simply a game, it's a vibe. The player's main means of interacting with the world is through a brush controlled with either the cursor controlled either by the mouse or the right stick, and a lot of time is spent trying to get the player into painting for fun. There are hardly any constraints or requirements even when a specific type of drawing is requested, so inevitably, there will be players that are not captivated whatsoever by the game's premise and just submit whatever to progress in the game. To those people, Chicory will come off as a pretty bland experience.

I almost fell into that group, in part because Chicory takes its time in showing its cards. The game takes heavy inspiration from The Legend of Zelda series, its top-down maps being filled with secrets and, more importantly, there being power-ups to collect that enable exploring new areas. This design, however, only really comes together towards the latter half of the game, when areas become more elaborate and the protagonist's toolset becomes more interesting. For example, the very first power-up the janitor get lets their ink light up dark places, which not only isn't much of a brush-y thing, but also reinforces the slow pace of the opening hours.

And I remember the exact turning point, the moment where I went from "Chicory might be better suited for young children" to "Chicory resonates with me". Somewhere before the midpoint of the game, the janitor meets Chicory, and the duo agrees to each paint one another -- prompting the player to draw Chicory as best they can. This is a pivotal moment in the story as it establishes the type of person (bunny?) the titular character is, and is a time when the central themes and mechanics are beginning to coalesce. And for some reason, even though most drawing assignments the game gave me were done half-heartedly up until that point, I found myself trying my absolute hardest to paint Chicory.

Which leads us into the second reason why the game might not resonate with many: Chicory: A Colorful Tale is a story made by artists, for artists, about the process of making art. Not professional artists, necessarily, but anyone who has ever tried to do art, whether or not they succeeded. Making art is grueling. It requires mastering a swathe of topics with no clear roadmap all while being constantly compared to peers who seem to do way better than you. At the end, what awaits you is very little reward, as any painting, or song, or whatever the end goal is will take hours, if not days of work, assuming it even comes out the way you envisioned it.

(And in the current climate, some dumbass techbro is likely to steal your work and call it an innovation, so there's that too.)

And it's easy, having only the goal in sight and so much pressure to achieve it, to begin to loathe the process, forgetting the fun there was in it in the first place and eventually just giving up on trying. It is the cause of the demise of many an art journey. It has been the biggest struggle in mine, and because of that, a lot of the text in Chicory, its allegories and character archetypes, speaks to me on a personal level. However, this wouldn't have always been the case, and it's easy to imagine many a player seeing it all go way over their head because making art was never really in their minds.

To be fair to that player, the whole flavor given to Chicory due to its narrative and main form of interaction with the environment is what makes the game stand out. Without those, it's just... fine. It has its many pros, but also its many cons. As a Zelda-like adventure, it's lacking in interesting dungeon designs, but does feature good puzzles and an overworld filled with nooks and crannies to unravel. Boss battles are a standout part of the experience, but they're made confusing by the lack of a health bar, and while many questlines are fun, 100%ing the game means chasing after some pretty frustrating collectibles.

So should you play Chicory, after all? If you've dabbled in art yourself, yes: you're likely to find something that resonates with your own journey, and if anything, it's refreshing to know you're not alone. If you've never tried to create things yourself... well, maybe do that. It's very enlightening, and earns you an appreciation for how intricate works like games and movies are. Once you've spent some time challenging yourself in that process, then, and only then, come back and decide if Chicory is the game for you.

A particularly powerful characteristic of games as a medium is that, in creating a virtual world with its own rules and that runs on its own time, they can not only achieve a level of immersion other forms of media struggle with, but also, they can borrow liberally from the tools those other forms of media use without breaking the experience. There are multiple examples of games that do so, but the latest and a new favorite is 1000xResist.

To define 1000xResist succinctly is in itself a challenge: to simply say that it is a sci-fi narrative game does help a potential player tell if it's their type of game or not, but betrays the amount of layers there are to the game and how much there is to see beneath the surface. It's a groundbreaking work, and if I only have this one paragraph left to convince you, let me say this: if you enjoy narrative games in any way, and especially if you make narrative games yourself, this is the game to pay attention to in 2024.

It was developed by and is the debut title of Sunset Visitor, a studio composed mostly of Asian-Canadian folks, and the events of the game take place on Earth, over a thousand years from the present day. Somewhere near the middle of the 21st century, Earth was visited by aliens humans called the Occupants. The Occupants didn't attack, per se, but they brought with them a horrifying disease that caused humans infected by it to rapidly perish. Only one person was immune: a young girl named Iris, who seemed to become immortal instead.

Failure to develop a cure in time, however, left Iris as the sole survivor from our species, and all those who walk the Earth, one thousand years after the occupants arrived, are clones of her. She is revered as the ALLMOTHER, who fights the Occupants to reclaim the surface. Meanwhile, her clones, who call each other sister, live in peace within a large enclosed facility called the Orchard, each sister with an assigned role. This is where the player joins the story as the new Watcher, whose function is to experience the ALLMOTHER's memories in Communion and interpret her teachings.

Based on that synopsis, one might expect the story to approach the themes of religion at some point, which it does. With so much death and technology, maybe it would ponder the meaning of life and what being alive really is, and that's also here. But would you expect it to discuss diaspora, and the challenges it places on the people undergoing it? Would you expect one of the deepest and most poignant explorations of generational trauma ever to grace videogames? Do you think 1000xResist has something to say about real-world geopolitical conflicts? About the nature of totalitarian regimes and the process through which they are created?

Because it does discuss those things, and much more. That is why it is such a difficult work to define in just a sentence, because it juggles such a wealth of themes that focusing just on the speculative fiction premise comes off as empty. Not to say that that premise is disconnected from the themes, however -- far from it. Even more impressive than the breadth of themes is how seamlessly they are woven into the narrative, how all of them emerge organically from the elements and characters in the story. With 1000xResist Sunset Visitor achieved something extremely challenging: to create a work that takes a crystal clear stance on several political issues, while not even for a moment feeling preachy.

As fantastic as the setting might be, as many cloning facilities, infinitely renewable resources and impossible life support technologies it might feature, 1000xResist feels authentic, as if it was a continuation of human history itself, with each event but a natural consequence of that which preceded it. The characters also avoid the fate of being one-dimensional stand-ins for the ideas they represent and instead sound like real people, with beliefs and personalities shaped by the environments they lived in. It also helps that the game features extensive voice acting that feels, for lack of a better word, mundane – not in a bad way, but as if these were real people having conversations.

Which is a good segue to get out of the 'what' and, going back to the intro of this review, to talk about the 'how'. Gameplay is split between two parts: the Orchard and the Communions, and while it would be unfair to say that it is in the latter that the direction truly shines, it is in the surreal, dream-like sequences of the ALLMOTHER's memory that the game's inspirations become more evident. Each Communion has a distinct flavour to it: some borrow a lot from cinema, while others replicate books or theater in their presentation. Some sequences are straightforward, while others are maze-like.

Nier is explicitly listed as an inspiration for 1000xResist, and it shows: Sunset Visitor plays around with the camera and its own mechanics, sometimes subverting players' expectations of how the game would play, to add metanarrative elements to certain passages. Sometimes, the camera is used to communicate the constrained feeling of an environment. Other times, the layout of the stage expresses confusion or unwillingness of the ALLMOTHER to share details of a memory. In some of the game's more climactic moments, a barrage of different shots is presented interwoven, seeming, at first, like a series of unrelated facts, but that soon begin to coalesce as the game slowly and elegantly ties its own story together.

The use of color is also noteworthy, with the game making great use of colored lighting to establish moods and frame its many scenes. The expert craftsmanship is apparent: 1000xResist is a game made by a small team with a very low budget, but you wouldn't think so at first glance because the competent art direction knew which corners to cut. Characters are beautifully rendered and well animated, since they're the focal points of most scenes, but the environments' comparatively simple geometry and texturing is played to the game's benefit, with scene composition favoring strongly defined shapes, spaces and colors that effectively communicate what the artists and designers wanted to show or say. So many indie games display hideous, low-effort visuals and try to pass them off as "retro" or "low-poly", and it's great to see one that goes the complete opposite way and deals so well with its own limitations.

This is an outstanding game, no matter how you slice it. 1000xResist is a stellar work of art that has been living rent-free in my head since I finished it, and will probably continue to for some time. It absolutely should not be slept on. Hekki Grace, sisters!

Sayonara: Wild Hearts is a musical action game by Simogo that puts the player in control of a woman with a broken heart as she explores the surreal world inside her mind. It's also the source of the prettiest migraine I have ever had.

Speaking purely in terms of presentation, Sayonara is an achievement on its own. Using the familiar motifs of tarot arcanas, the game establishes its protagonist and the antagonists in gorgeously animated 3D scenes that seamlessly merge into the gameplay. Tension builds up and releases along with the beats, which in themselves are a treat for the synthwave enjoyers out there. There are also some fantastic ideas that mesh concepts related to sound and music to the level design in unexpected and mindblowing ways, the Stereo Lovers stage being my uncontested favorite.

But there is such a thing as too much color, too much flashing and too much motion. Having finished the game in a single sitting just over an hour long, I walked away with a headache so bad, the mere thought of playing the game again to attempt high scores or solve the riddles felt terrifying. I shiver to think of someone with actual epilepsy trying this game out, as even for me, as beautiful as the motorcycle ride through the Heartbreak Subspace was, it's hard to tell if it was worth it in the end.

Plus, as wondrous as the sights are, the gameplay lacks the mechanical precision that one would expect from a game tagged as rhythm. Controls feel floaty and the intense use of perspective and unusual framing leads to lots of avoidable mistakes when dodging or swaying. Plus, the intended movement rarely matches the beat, which means this is less of a musical game and more a game with music playing along the action. These are all intentional design decisions, mind you, and they work very well for what the game is trying to achieve, but it bears saying that this won't scratch the rhythm game itch nor does it have that extensive, satisfying replayability those games tend to have.

All in all, Sayonara: Wild Hearts merits a recommendation, but a very cautious one. You have to know what you’re getting into, and you should have some aspirin nearby just in case.

Sunny-side-up eggs and toast. A warm cup of coffee. Relaxing piano music. An easel and a canvas. What better way to enjoy a morning?

Behind the Frame invites its player to revel in that tranquil scenery. It tells the story of a young painter who's trying her best to enter an art exhibition in New York and, on an afternoon that would have been spent with the easel, ends up learning more about an old neighbor who doesn't interact with other people much. As a short narrative-focused game, it's better not to go any deeper into the story in a review: suffice to say, it's a touching and easy to relate to story about being true to oneself and one's feelings.

Much like Tangle Tower, another 2D hand-animated point-n-click on Steam, Behind the Frame immediately distinguishes itself through its immaculate vibes: the Ghibli-inspired characters and animation, gorgeous environments and emotional tunes are highly effective in setting the mood to our lovable artist's surreal adventure. The similarities end there, however, as Behind the Frame is much more focused on its narrative than anything else.

The game is strictly linear, with six chapters composed of events that unfold in sequence -- not unexpected from a narrative game, but the particular choice of mechanics here does end up giving off this distinct feeling of being constrained. It's also far lighter on puzzles, which, bar the ones at the tail end of the game, are solvable within seconds. This makes the package less attractive for its brainteasers, and more of a game to unwind to on a lazy evening. On that front, it makes a very compelling case for itself.

This is the first original IP from Akatsuki Taiwan, and it does leave a good impression along with the lingering question on whether they'll make more original games like this.

A fun side effect of writing about games, even on an amateur level, is that one ends up reflecting and researching on games a bit deeper and thus getting to know more about them than if they just hop from game to game. I originally planned to open this review by talking about the early days of the DS and PSP, how despite the DS being the best selling (and arguably best) portable in history, the two portables being presented in 2004 left audiences puzzled as to what Nintendo was thinking, and why anyone would want that quirky thing instead of the much slicker PSP. That's because I believed that to be the cause for Konami opting to play it safe and make the first DS Castlevania a sequel -- an assumption which proved incorrect.

No, Iga was pretty much sold on the DS from the start, and Aria of Sorrow's great sales on a Nintendo platform sealed the deal on the DS as the host for the next portable entry in the Castlevania series. As for why make a direct sequel, in particular, that is owed to Iga knowing that he and his team had accomplished something special with Aria, both in terms of storyline and gameplay. Iga truly loves the soul system from that game, and that would become even more evident years later, with Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, but I digress.

As a direct sequel to Aria, Dawn of Sorrow might get criticised for being a rethreading of known ground, but the fact of the matter is, it's rethreading some damn solid ground. Most of what I mention in my Aria of Sorrow review applies to its sequel as well, from the robust gameplay systems to the beautiful sprite art. There are some areas in which Dawn attempts to stand out from its prequel, some of which are successful, some of which, not so much.

Immediately apparent from the cover of the game is that the art style for character art was changed, moving away from Ayami Kojima's (gorgeous) character portraits to... somewhat generic anime art. This change is said to be a result of demographics, with portable gamers being mainly children and, as such, it making sense to use character art that appealed more to that age group. Unfortunately, none of us happened to be in the room when that decision was taken to loudly point out that Aria was a success among that very demographic and that aging down the brand identity so suddenly might be a bad idea, so this is what we got stuck with.

It's not that the character art is terrible -- it reminds me of Rondo, which also used anime art and is still widely beloved by the fanbase -- but Dawn is trying to tell a story from a handicapped position and nailing the gothic horror vibes right from the cover would have helped its case by a lot. See, the position of a sequel to a work that was never written in a way to have one is a difficult one: the big twists have already happened and characters have experienced their respective growths, so what do we work with to make a new story?

(Incidentally, Dawn opens by spoiling the big twist in Aria, so absolutely play Aria first if you can.)

What immediately springs to mind are those Disney direct-to-VHS sequels that were mostly pretty forgettable, when not antithetical to the original work, as that's absolutely the vibe one gets when one mischievous gang of troublemakers shows up in the opening in Dawn to oppose Soma and his crew. The generic cartoon aesthetic makes for a poor first impression even though the storyline is actually quite competent and, for a game ostensibly marketed at children, it shows some rather dark imagery.

The idea is that, with Dracula being forever gone, a cult forms from people that desire a new Dark Lord, and a few of its head figures step forward as candidates to fill the power vacuula. They decide to have a go at Soma, attacking him and his girlfriend when the two are hanging out in town, and our boy doesn't take too kindly to that, setting out in pursuit of the group, pulling the whole crew from Aria in with him. What follows is a metroidvania romp just like Aria, which has Soma claiming monsters' souls as he brings down the Dark Lord wannabes.

Where Dawn successfully improves on Aria is in quality of life features as well as better tuning. On the former front, Soma can now use two different equipment sets that can be swapped at the press of the X button, a very welcome feature as it switching souls without entering the menu, thus letting the player adapt to each situation faster. The game also makes good use of the DS's top screen, displaying either the castle map or a screen with Soma's and enemy's stats. While having the map always visible is a godsend in this genre, having enemy info readily available is great when farming souls, as it does exactly the same thing the gadget from the Advance Collection does in Aria.

As for tuning, weapons have been rebalanced, emphasizing their variety. There's even a system through which, by imbuing weapons with certain souls, they can be upgraded, a nice addition that unfortunately ends up underutilized due to the rarity of some of the souls it requires. Having a use for excess souls, however, is a nice thought, and again I point to Bloodstained as the unofficial successor to Dawn, with Iga further refining this idea in that game.

Incidentally, while Aria already had souls that powered up with their count, Dawn brings this feature to the forefront explicitly calling it the Soul Level -- this is also a key feature in Bloodstained, where it exists for all souls-- uh, all shards. Souls have also been retooled in Dawn: while a lot of them are reskins from those from Aria, there are a handful of interesting new additions to the roster, and the player can expect to work with different toolsets than the ones the prequel gives. Of note is that late game souls are absolutely stacked, making them really gratifying to use.

And they have to be, because the best part of Dawn is its extremely challenging bosses. Aria's were great, but Dawn takes it to a new level: every boss is a unique enemy with a carefully crafted moveset, and their hits are extremely punishing. Even when spamming items, playing sloppily ultimately ends up in Soma getting overwhelmed, so instead, the player is expected to learn each tell and carefully avoid each attack. The magic seal mechanic is the cherry on top, forcing the player to remain vigilant for the prompt while adding flavor to finishing off the boss.

(Admittedly, if playing on an emulator, magic seals are an absolutely cursed mechanic, practically serving as an accidental form of anti-piracy . In that case, use the mod that removes them from the game.)

But is it better than Aria? Probably not: it will never be able to count on the simplicity and novelty factor that that game presented. However, even if it doesn't surpass its predecessor, it is a thoroughly enjoyable game that proudly stands at its prequel's side. Fans of Aria willing to look past a horrid first impression will find themselves a fiercely challenging game that brings back many of the original's boons.

I've been debating for a while whether I wanted to write a review for Silent Hill: The Short Message. I actually had one half-done and completely scrapped it because dogpiling further on something that's already being (rightfully) bashed by half the internet felt like a waste of energy, and I'd rather just spend my time turning "pixels make monkey brain release happy chemicals" into several paragraphs, or at the very least discussing something that has pros and cons. TSM kept showing up, though, and after seeing a bit of the developer interviews, I felt like I needed to write something, if only for the sake of catharsis. Strap in, this is going to be a long rant.

Content Warning: Spoilers, plus every warning that comes with this game (suicide, self-harm, bullying, parental/sexual abuse, etcetera).

My understanding of the current strategy at Konami is that the years of mismanagement left the company devoid of its original talent, so the same people that ran the company into the ground now try to find a way to outsource as much they can of their existing IP, see what sticks, and run with it. Silent Hill is their main victim, and The Short Message, their latest attempt at "reviving" the once prestigious series by having developer HexaDrive puppeteer the corpse.

And I wouldn't have touched it with a ten-foot pole -- I accepted long ago that Silent Hill is dead -- but I heard someone say that it was made by an indie developer and it was about gay girls and grief, which picked my interest. After going through TSM... I guess I understand how one could conclude that's what was happening if they squinted? But like, really squinted, and missed the collectables that establish Maya as not only heterosexual, but also pregnant? It's really not a queer narrative -- but never mind that, because that's far from biggest problem.

The Short Message can be described as an infinite trainwreck. It's not simply that it's bad -- it is, right from the start -- but as it goes on and on, as you stare in disbelief as more and more train piles up and the carnage keeps increasing, it becomes so much worse. In my first run, I wrote it off as a well-meaning but horrendously hamfisted attempt at tackling a serious theme, but as I dove into it, the more it felt like an offensive, out-of-touch caricature of what it portrayed, then finally as an harmful, exploitative piece of media and a terrible omen for the future of Konami properties. And instead of jumping right through to the end, let's go through each of those stages to understand why defenses offered for the game's many issues are absurd.

Hamfisted

One of the greatest tools a horror writer can employ is the uncertain, the unknown. Scares are not nearly as effective as the anxiety that precedes them. Show the monster and we'll run the opposite direction. Imply a monster and we'll be tense the whole day, not knowing what it is or when or from where it will jump out at us. This goes for smaller and/or more abstract aspects of the world, as well: information that is directly told isn't as impactful as that which the reader pieces out on their own from breadcrumbs scattered in the text, and then some of their own imagination. The keyword here is "subtlety".

Think of Silent Hill 2. In that game, protagonist James Sunderland is invited to Silent Hill via a letter from his wife Mary, which is especially suspicious considering that Mary has been dead for three entire years. Except not really, as we soon find out. Even worse, we start discovering that James not only is not sound of mind, he might not be the good person he says he is. These things come up organically over the narrative: there are multiple things we can deduce about James as a character from his behavior, and he is a textbook example of an unreliable narrator, which leaves the truth behind multiple events undetermined.

The Short Message, on the other hand, features teens toxic relationship with social media, so in a span of thirty seconds, the main character looks at her phone, concludes and states aloud that she'll always have less followers than her friend, and decides to kill herself right then and there. Y'know. Just in case you didn't realize that she has a bad thing going on with social media, like, she has very low self esteem, and is depressed, and... did I mention social media? Because maybe you missed that.

Whether the writers think of themselves too highly or of their audience as complete idiots, the fact is that The Short Message is more afraid of its player than the opposite. It is a game desperate to be understood, certain that its player won't manage to grasp it, leading it to spell out everything in eye-rollingly clear detail. Every character's motivations is expressed plainly, every note, flashback and monologue recounts events in vivid, unnatural detail through writing so stiff it could qualify as a blunt weapon, and nothing is left to be felt, interpreted or speculated.

The result is a mix of second-hand embarassment, accidental comedy and tastelessness, and there are many, many examples of that we could pick apart, from the way the game communicates the protagonist's suffering of parental abuse, her relationship with social media, views on mental health... Even the names. Maya's full name is Maya Hindenburg. There are a bunch of problems with the game's supposedly German setting, starting with the name "Kettenstadt", and as a non-German person, I'll leave that to the German folk to elucidate but calling a German character, especially one like Maya, "Hindenburg", is truly something special.

One of the worst offenders, though, actually has nothing to do with any of the characters and is instead a note that describes "The Silent Hill Phenomenon", a medical phenomenon where mentally distraught people will sometimes see fog outside in days of clear weather. "Societal uncertainty or apprehension about the future manifests as fog". It's a desperate and transparent attempt to explain how one can silent hill outside of Silent Hill, and as such, this is a Silent Hill game!

Besides lacking any sort of grace or mystery, this excuse is being made about something that truly doesn't matter: the physical location of games has been the least of the franchise's problems in the last decade or two. Resident Evil 4 took place miles away from Raccoon City and the T-Virus, but it was a great game, so who cares? Heck, P.T. took place in a hallway and people went nuts over it, and it's unlikely the hype would have died down if they'd announce it wouldn't take place in literal Silent Hill. But apparently, it's such a big deal to the writers that they needed to include this note about it in the game.

Out-of-touch

The Short Message isn't a queer narrative, but the first chapter definitely has one thinking otherwise. Was this intentional? Was the developer queerbaiting for clout? At first, it felt like this might be the case, but then Hanlon's razor hit, and one look at the rest of the script revealed that the explanation was probably much simpler: this story about teenage girls had probably been written by an out-of-touch middle-aged man who only ever observed them from afar. This suspicion was later confirmed in the developer interviews.

There's a tendency for men like that to, mixing their own perception of sexuality with their ignorance on the nuances of social interactions between young women, write characters that read as absolute gal pals, but are actually super straight, creating these fictional people that register as unnatural to most people and as somewhat revolting to queer folk, as they reinforce the narrative that homosexuality is just a phase people grow out of while simultaneously fetishizing same-sex attraction.

Not that it's worth lingering on the topic of queerness, because unfortunately, that's just the tip of the iceberg as far as TSM's portrayals of people go: the way teenage girls are presented registers like a condescending caricature made by an older generation, complete with an understanding on how young people engage with social media that could reasonably air on your regional equivalent of Fox News. Furthermore, the events involving bullying are so surface-level that they seem straight out of some American rom-com -- the jocks 'jumpscare' gets more laughter than gasps -- and the portrayals of mental illness are uninformed at best and harmful at worst.

The latter is especially problematic because TSM operates under the guise of doing public service and warning about suicide -- more on that in a second -- but good intentions aren't enough when talking about such a theme. Much to the contrary: because vulnerable people will very easily shut themselves off from others, reveling in platitudes like TSM does is far more likely to have the opposite effect from the desired one. Ironically, the game alludes to this phenomenon, but misunderstands it and paints it as a character flaw.

At one point in the story, Anita tells her friend via text that "adults don't understand". It's meant as a failure of her character -- she won't reach out -- but she's right. Adults don't understand. They forget that being a teenager is a messed up part of life, where these developing kids struggle with all sorts of intensive changes to their brains and bodies, as well as a gamut of emotions adults may have gotten used to after years of living them, but teens are definitely not. If anything, the amount of vile discourse around perfectly normal teenager insecurities TSM sprung out of people is proof that we definitely don't care enough for our teens, and are probably encouraging them to shut themselves off instead of seeking help.

Which is a very good segue into the next point: a lingering question throughout The Short Message's runtime is "does this game have anything to say?". Yes, social media bad. We know. Facebook has been there for 20 years and we've all seen it. And yes, depression bad, and that hotline number spammed on the player's face will maybe help. And? Are you going to say something about it, open some sort of discussion, make some criticism that isn't of the main character herself?

Let me help with some leading questions: how does our current societies and the physical spaces they occupy shape teenagers relationship with social media, and are the problems in that relationship exclusive to that age group? What could be changed about social media to avoid that? What sort of structures are in place that allow, if not incentivise bullying to happen, and what groups are more often targeted? What about cyberbullying, specifically? Are women more vulnerable? Are artists and artistic-minded folk more likely to suffer from mental illnesses?

There are many discussions TSM could bring to the table if it would just stop and focus into one theme. The problem is, it isn't remotely interested in any of those things.

Exploitative

A somewhat frustrating take that's taken over discourse around the Silent Hill series is that it's all about "trauma". It's a reductionist view, for one, as the series presents a variety of fascinating themes, and trauma is mostly worked on in Silent Hill 2. Even looking at that game alone, however, the lens it uses to examine that subject is important: when people say SH2 is about trauma, they refer to how that game examines it through people who have suffered through it, not focusing on their past, but instead, on their present. It's not literally about trauma, it's about the broken husks of people that trauma leaves behind.

In TSM, there's a scene somewhere in the first half of the game triggered by interacting with a bloodied sink where a razor sits. It's a graphic scene that shows the protagonist inflicting self-harm while crying and begging for forgiveness, and from the start, it registered as tasteless and unnecessary: looking at the sink already told the entire story, and if you've dealt with people that practice self-harm, you know it's not something to be shown. Much worse than misguided, however, hearing the developers themselves repeat this idea of Silent Hill equaling trauma and how it shaped their entire work reveals the ugly truth: TSM is entirely about trauma and in no way about people.

Suicide isn't a theme to be discussed, but rather, it's material, and the point of the game is not, in fact, in starting conversations about the topic, nor in building characters or exploring their mental states. Instead, it wants its small cast to suffer as hard as possible, in as many ways as possible, for the audience's perverse appreciation. It's a theme park ride where we tack as many mental illnesses and assorted cruelties as possible onto the character so as to... scare? the player? "To your left, right now, the liiiiiiiiving room of chiiiiild abuuuuuse!!! 👻". It has been labeled "trauma tourism" by some, an accurate descriptor for what the game actually achieves.

It turns out, and gamers with lower constitutions might want to sit down before hearing this, but good horror isn't just a slideshow of bad stuff. It's actually an elaborate sequence of build ups, releases, and developments. Shocking, right? It goes further than that: psychological horror isn't quite the same as flipping through the pages in the ICD's psychiatry section. Doing so is more likely to confuse than to terrify, and the fact that people who didn't understand these things got a few million dollars and the license to a high-profile IP is disturbing.

Or, really, understand anything about writing a good story or dealing with sensitive subjects. To think HexaDrive was once being considered as developers for the Silent Hill 2 Remake... if these people had written Silent Hill 2, they'd place a note with a psych evaluation of James somewhere so as to clue the player in. There would be more flashbacks showing Eddie being bullied than actual meetings with Eddie, and they'd be sure to show Angela being violently abused on camera. Otherwise, how would the player realize why those characters act the way they do, and how would they be able to empathize?

Not that Bloober Team is set to fare any better, but we'll cross that (burning) bridge when we get there. For now, Silent Hill: The Short Message is a pathetic addition not simply to the already bastardized enough Silent Hill series, but to gaming in general, and the fact that it claims to have a message of any sort, to have importance, is offensive. If anything, it serves as a strong proof that free can sometimes be too expensive a price of admission.

The chase sections

...oh, yeah, this is not a pure walking sim, there's chase sections and such. Bolted on chase sections, so I might as well bolt on something about them to this review. There are a few chase sections where Anita is pursued by a cherry blossom monster in the Otherworld, and you know they're coming because she will begin to desperately pant and whimper as soon as she steps into one such area, almost as if the game was telling its player it's time to be scared.

What's most jarring about these sections, however, is how HexaDrive managed to make something entirely composed of outdated horror game tropes. There's even a bit at the very end of the game that's reminiscent of The Eight Pages, except with none of the depth, or charm, or... anything that already lousy game had to offer. I doubt ever they played The Eight Pages or even lived through its heights of popularity to understand what made it click, anyway.

Likewise, some believe Silent Hill: The Short Message to be some sort of response to P.T., as if to show they don't need Kojima to make a beloved free teaser. I refuse to believe the anyone involved in this nonsense ever played P.T., or even know it existed. If they did, and this was truly an attempt to replicate it's success... let's say it's no simple feat to miss the mark by this much, and congratulations are in order.

I didn't expect to be saying this about a Konami product from the 2020s, but Castlevania: Advance Collection is a gold-standard for what a collection of retro games should be.

This collection features all three GBA Castlevania games, those being Circle of the Moon, Harmony of Dissonance and Aria of Sorrow, all of which can be played in their American, European or Japanese versions. There is little to no input lag, at least on the PS4 version, and the emulator comes with all sorts of convenient functionality, like save states, a clip function, a rewind function and remappable controls, a checklist that not all retro game collections manage to fill.

It goes a step further than that, however, adding an encyclopedia with information on all enemies and items, as well as what it calls "gadgets". Those gadgets are helpful UI elements that aid in the completion of each game: in Circle of the Moon, they show which enemies carry an unobtained DSS card; in Harmony of Dissonance, they show key items and furniture pieces present in an area; finally, in Aria of Sorrow, they show whether Soma has picked up the soul of an enemy he's fighting at that moment. All three gadgets are very welcome additions to their respective games.

The collection also comes with the SNES port of Rondo of Blood, Dracula X... but we try not to talk about that one.