The town of Salem is haunted by The Bell Killer, a serial killer who has left behind many bodies and very little leads. Ronan O'Connor, a detective working on the case, tracks the killer down to an apartment building in town, but ends up overpowered by the killer and becomes a victim himself. Bound to this world by his inability to close the case in life, he sets out to search Salem for clues as a spirit and try to find closure.

Like its protagonist, Murdered: Soul Suspect was done dirty. The game was developed by a small-ish studio called Airtight Games, pitched by Square-Enix as part of the publisher's initiative to capture more of a Western audience, a push that, in 2022, we know didn't end well. Square never really understood what Western audiences wanted and racked up many failures while blaming the studios for it. Murdered was one such failure. Upon release, Murdered was priced at $60 and was marketed unrealistically, resulting in a mixed reception, lukewarm sales, and the closure of Airtight Games just weeks after the game hit store shelves..

Which is sad, because it's such a fascinating game. It can't be said that it is a masterpiece, nor that it justifies its original price tag, but at the prices the game is usually sold -- I bought it for a paltry $4 -- it offers a great bang-for-your-buck, so long as you approach it as the mystery thriller, almost story-driven game that it is.

It centers around investigative gameplay: the map is semi-open for exploration, but generally, Ronan will be led from location to location as he discovers new facts about the case. Whenever he spots a place of interest, like say, a place the killer has visited, the game enters an investigative mode in which Ronan poses questions and the player searches the scene for clues that can answer it.

Of course, there's the twist highlighted by the game's title: Ronan, the main character, is dead, which brings a series of mechanics to the investigation that make the game stand out as unique. As a spirit, he can go through walls, which lets him visit places living people cannot. He can also possess people, and while that doesn't allow direct control over them, he can listen in to their thoughts and even subtly nudge them towards performing certain actions.

Each area is also filled with collectibles that yield some information about the game's world. It could be a character, or the town, or historic events. It might not even relate to the plot at all. While some may cringe at the thought of having so many collectibles in a game, it felt, to me, like Murdered was enhanced by their presence, as they allow it an opportunity to enhance its setting and characters. Plus, if you pay attention to the tidbits you collect about the Bell Killer, you might figure out some of the twists in the story before they happen, a testament to how solid the overall plot is as a detective story.

The game is mechanically solid, with the most direct comparison I can make being either Frogwares's Sherlock Holmes games, or Ace Attorney but in 3D. Walk around inspecting everything you think is relevant, talk to those present, and present the correct clues to advance in the case. Sometimes, there's also puzzles to be solved. It's simple and straightforward as far as investigative games go, which makes me think that the expectation for AAA mechanics and storytelling where the only thing that made reviewers look at the game so negatively.

Okay, that's not necessarily true. There's one aspect of the game that's disfunctional in a way that feels jarring when held against the overall experience, and that is the combat. Not a single soul ever praised this, and for good reason: there is one (1) enemy type in the game, a demon, which Ronan is defenseless against unless it's approached from behind, from where he can perform a stealth takedown.

There's about ten instances of such combat sections popping up in the game, and each of them feels like it was set up so that you can get dispatch every enemy quickly and then go back to the actual fun part of the game. It reeks of meddling from upper management, as the way in which it feels disconnected to the rest of the game is like it was made with the explicit purpose of ticking a box that higher-ups thought the game needed to be successful.

Ultimately, more than anything else, Murdered: Soul Suspect feels like a wasted opportunity. Had its scope been kept a bit more under control, had the game been marketed correctly, and had it been given a more approachable price tag, much in the vein of Frogwares's work with Sherlock Holmes, there might have been room for a franchise here. As it is, if you're a mystery fan, get it on a sale -- the developer is gone anyway -- and kick back for an enjoyable whodunnit story.

- Mom, mom! Can I have RHYTHM HEAVEN™?
- We have RHYTHM HEAVEN™ at home, dear.

Set in the surreal landscapes of the dreams of a young man who, even in his sleep, cannot escape the trappings of modern life, Melatonin is a rhythm game that takes mundane, momentaneous actions of our day-to-day, like the swiping of a credit card, or swinging of a pendulum, sets them to a beat and turns them into a rhythm game.

The game is rendered in a cartoon style with soft pastel colors, which match its low-fi, low energy audio design. As enticing as this presentation is at first, it's at the core of the issues with Melatonin that ultimately turn it into a deeply disappointing experience. The game does not let go of this chill aesthetic to its detriment, resulting into multiple issues with the gameplay. Lack of effective cues within the minigames is the most important one: the sounds that are meant to guide the player are low-energy and hard to make out, like the almost hum-like whirring of a printer, echoes of thunder in the distance, a ding sound that's easily drowned out... all of them far too timid, too reserved.

The contrast is evident when the game is placed side by side with its (obvious) inspiration Rhythm Heaven, as in that game, cues lean on the side of loud and energetic: animal noises, clapping, verbal commands.. even the more artificial prompts are loud clanks, screeches and the like, all of them unmistakable for anything else. The sound design is so intense, in fact, that some cues are committed to memory forever. Anyone who played Rhythm Heaven can probably hear these:

And buh buh buh TAP TAP TAP!
JAB, JAB, JAB, GOGOGO!
Wubbadubbadubbadub, is that true?! EH!
Two flipper rolls!

Sure, not all Rhythm Heaven minigames are perfect, but most Melatonin ones veer on the side of bad due to a widespread unintuitiveness and lack of clarity. The game has to rely on a visual indicator during practice to explain each minigame, and sometimes, the cues are so obtuse, even that doesn't help much. Time is an example where not even the game can explain how the minigame is supposed to work; Money and Stress reuse sound cues for different inputs, forcing reliance on visuals only; Work and Dating take it a step further and change the sounds midway to throw the player off...

Melatonin even commits a cardinal sin for a rhythm game in that, in some levels, such as Shopping and Exercise, the stage track itself doesn't match the intended inputs at all, meaning it's far easier to play with the BGM volume set to 0 -- a depressing way to play a rhythm game, where vibing to the music ought to be a pillar of the experience. On that note, the remixes between nights are another way in which the game performs disfavorably: the basic gist is taken straight from RH, with multiple minigames interspersed with each other as a unique song plays, but Melatonin does not visually change anything to make the remix feel new, and while the tracks featured are unique, they're neither memorable nor exciting, resulting in remixes that lack the cathartic release one yearns for after practicing multiple minigames in a row.

Among those hardcore rhythm gamers desperate for a fix, I suppose some might see value in Melatonin. I, however, and I'm left confused at the glowing reviews it received: despite playing the game to the end, I can't remember a single song, a single motif nor a single sound cue from Melatonin's many underwhelming levels. The experience was about as exciting as its main character's life, and all I could think of as the credits rolled was that we all could really use a new Rhythm Heaven.

Me: Hmm, I'm going to play this old David Cage game. Can't be that bad.
David Cage: Sex QTE
Me: what
David Cage: Push the analog stick to FUCK

The thing about playing Quantic Dream stuff in 2024 is that we know it's not going to go well. Several years ago, it was possible to have a generous interpretation of David Cage's works by assuming he was just an eccentric man who adored movies and who was trying to make this new brand of adventure games work. QD's games are different from the norm, even if their quality is inconsistent and their content, often questionable. And yes, Cage does have a history of displaying an inflated ego in public, but one could excuse that as hustle from a person who has to confidently sell unusual ideas.

Of course, since the Quantic Dream lawsuits, looking at things kindly like that has gone from hard to impossible. It now is publicly known that the company is a cesspool, that its founders are crooks ("I'm not under oath, so can I lie?" is more unforgettable than any line in a QD game) and that the auteur at the center of it all is by no means a misunderstood genius, but a bigot and a jackass. Well, alleged bigot and jackass, one might say, as many of the cases are still on-going, but the problem is, the mere knowledge of what went on during those trials informs the consumption of the works and prevents any sort of charitable interpretation.

Why am I saying all this? Because Indigo Prophecy desperately needed a charitable interpretation.

Its opening is deceptively strong: The bathroom at a diner. A man inside the stall, shaking. Possessed by a cloaked figure. He gets up, opens the stall door. An older man, washing his hands. Doesn't see the first man walk up behind him. He falls to the ground and is stabbed, again and again. The murderer raises his head, his task done, and comes to his senses. His name is Lucas Kayne, and he will need the player's help in order to flee the scene without being caught.

Lucas is not the only playable character, however, as once he is home free, we cut to detectives Carla Valenti and Tyler Miles, who arrive at the scene of the crime to investigate the gruesome murder. These scenes very quickly and effectively establish a central mystery as well as a (criminally underused) cat-and-mouse game that our protagonists are about to play. There's tension and intrigue to work with, backed by surprisingly good voice acting for a game of its time, as well as an exceptional orchestral score by the late Angelo Badalamenti of all people.

All of which is wasted by the most worthless vision, starting with the thoroughly incompetent writing. Anyone who's read reviews for Indigo Prophecy has probably heard that the game falls off during the last third, and it must be clarified that those reviewers are overselling the story: in truth, the script's quality begins to decay almost immediately after the opening, completely jumping the shark by the halfway point. The final third is simply when time and money started to run out and plot points had to be compressed, but no investors or sequels could ever have saved such drivel.

To call the writing amateurish would be hyping it up: Indigo Prophecy is what one would get if they took an 11-year-old boy, took him to watch some of IMDB's top rated films, then asked him to pen his own movie. The result would likely be a jumble of incongruent themes and lousy plot devices, much like this one: Would you like a detective story, a supernatural one, or sci-fi? How about all three? Because IP is a game about mayans, AI, interdimensional bugs, the Force, the military, Dragon Ball fighting, visions, racist stereotypes, the Illuminati, getting impregnated by the undead, alien tech, secret societies of homeless people, irradiating the undead baby with the alien tech...

And that's not even mentioning the awkward rip-offs of famous and successful films: Silence of the Lambs, The Matrix, you'll know it when you see it. However, it's the power fantasy at the core of it is the most embarassing: Lucas Kayne is our 11-year-old's OC, a mediocre man at first that becomes The Chosen One, the almighty saviour of humanity, becoming ever more powerful in a barrage of scenes of escalating absurdity. Of course, he also gets to sleep with all the women, who for some reason find him irresistible.

Carla and Tyler, on the other hand, while initially promising to replicate the buddy cop dynamic from old police movies, become almost set dressing by the halfway point. Carla, in particular, has her personality and motivations entirely wiped by the end of the story in order to achieve a conclusion that's entirely centered on Lucas. There are three endings, entirely decided by the player's performance in the last scene, but whichever one the player gets, the story ends on an egregious note of Heavy Rain-grade bullcrap, and they're not even allowed the pleasure of an ending where everyone dies.

Speaking of Heavy Rain, as painful as it is to give any kind of credit to that game, Indigo Prophecy is the predecessor and it shows. The whole QTE gameplay was still getting figured out, and most of the scenes use this Genius-style UI that has you moving the analog sticks in the directions it shows to pass each scene. That it's garish is a given, but it's the nonstop prompts having nothing to do with the action onscreen that stings. In later games, there's far less inputs to perform and they all have something to do with the action and/or motion going on in the screen, fostering some sort of connection while allowing the player to watch what's happening.

Then again, early on in IP, you do push the analog stick forward over and over to make Lucas thrust into a woman, so maybe less connection can be good in some situations. It might sound like I'm making a big deal out of this, but it goes back to the idea of interpreting things charitably. Indigo Prophecy could maybe be written off as a camp classic if some credence could be given to its creators. Instead, the sex minigame reads as childish; the numerous movie rip-offs, "Citizen Cage" posters and "New Movie" instead of "New Game" in the main menu all register as pretentious slop; and the questionable depictions of race, gender and mental illness are perceived as intentional and heartfelt.

If anything, the fact that Quantic Dream got any investors for its later games after delivering this rubbish is a sign that, at the very least, they have some fierce negotiators among them. As a consumer, however, unless you need something cheap to point at and laugh for about five hours, then walk away from with fewer brain cells than you started with, Indigo Prophecy is an easy pass.

What a masterpiece.

I first played A Link to the Past as a young child and was obsessed with it, but it was playing the NES Zelda later in life that really made me appreciate ALTTP all the more. It is where the series really hit its stride, the power of the Super Nintendo having allowed developers to incorporate ambitious design ideas that were impossible before. This was also when the series began to have more of an established identity, with many of its staples being born here, like the Master Sword, the Spin Attack, the hookshot, bottled faeries, those text boxes that end in a "did you understand?" prompt... though in that latter case, the cruel practice of defaulting the cursor to "no" would only begin with Ocarina of Time.

It sounds like a minor thing, but the fact that the game started worrying about information conveyed to the player is in itself a sign of a major shift in the series. The original Zelda rarely expressed itself in words, and when it did, it was immensely cryptic. In A Link to the Past, information gathering is paramount: it's important to talk to NPCs wherever you find them, as they'll give key information that will aid in your quest. They'll also give important hints about the overworld in general, like the location of optional items and upgrades. If someone says "toss a stone into the river up north", you'd better start practicing those throws.

The game strikes a nice balance where it doesn't hold your hand, but also rarely has you making logic leaps about what to do next. On my latest playthrough, I put that to the test, pretending I didn't know where to go or what to do, and it made me appreciate why some people call Zelda an RPG: ALTTP punishes players who play it as an action game and ignore the world around them. It's a game where exploration and note-taking are as important to your quest as completing the dungeons.

Speaking of dungeons, it's another area in which ALTTP is a massive step forward for the franchise. The original LoZ may have had some sprawling dungeons to navigate, but each room was relatively simple: it had enemies to kill and/or blocks to push, and had up to four exits. They also only spanned one floor, with stairs leading to secret passages that connected two faraway rooms. LoZ's levels were groundbreaking for their time, but nowadays feel simplistic and, by the end of the game, repetitive.

A Link to the Past features a whopping eleven dungeons, each of which has a defined identity and hides an important piece of equipment for Link to use, and their design has been massively overhauled. On the room level, rooms come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and can be entered and left from multiple directions. Often, it's important not just to reach a room, but to enter it from the right place. The dungeons' structure in itself has been greatly overhauled, with levels now spaning multiple floors that offer multiple ways to move between them.

Despite being a 2D game, ALTTP expects its player to think of a maze as an object in 3D space, carefully minding which rooms are above or below others, as well as what paths around the level are possible. It's impossible to overstate just how devious the level design is: so many times, the thing you need is right in front of you, unreachable, making you scratch your head over how to get it. The game calls for plenty of observation as well as out-of-the-box thinking, with places like the Tower of Hera hiding the Moon Pearl behind a combination of stage contraptions, the Swamp Palace and its very first room exploring the relationship between worlds, and Skull Woods having multiple entrances, turning the surrounding overworld area into a part of the dungeon.

The overworld is almost a dungeon in itself now, its paths gradually opening themselves as Link's inventory fills up. The map has tons of nooks and crannies ready to reveal themselves the avid explorer, but also features notable landmarks and locations that make it feel like a world instead of just a grid of screens. The experience is further enhanced once the Dark World enters the mix, a twisted version of the real world that becomes accessible after the first few dungeons.

The Dark World changes how the player thinks about overworld navigation by opening up impossible paths in the Light World, and the duality between worlds is explored by a handful of puzzles throughout the game. Plus, the Dark World's atmosphere, enveloped in eternal twilight, filled with far more dangerous monsters than what you'd faced to that point in your adventure, reinforces the feelings of desolation that are central to A Link to the Past's narrative.

A Link to the Past is a true marvel. If anything, replaying it makes me slightly melancholic that the game gets pushed aside so often, along with the rest of the top-down Zeldas, as being outdated and obtuse. I've heard so many complaints that the puzzles are too hard, or that the enemies are too strong, or that it has too many dungeons. If that wasn't bad enough, I've watched a streamer ragequit over a puzzle that can easily be solved by looking at the in-game map, which he refused to do.

And the saddest part is that the Zelda series in itself evolved in order to accommodate these complaints, with some of the later games not respecting the player's intelligence and preventing them from navigating the levels on their own -- heck, the industry itself followed suit, with so many modern AAA games going as far as spoiling puzzles before you even touch them. ALttP is a throwback to earlier times, not too early that games gave you no information, not too late that they held you by the hand. A true Link to the Past.

...I cannot possibly end on that pun, can I? Uh... So, ALttP is really good and... uh... Hey, did you know there was this Japan-exclusive SNES Zelda game that was essentially a remix of A Link to the Past?! It's called Inishie no Sekiban, or Ancient Stone Tablets, and was released on an obscure SNES addon called the Satellaview. It has four parts to it, and plays basically like an official romhack of ALttP, which is a treat for all of us who love the game. If you're interested, you can find more info on the game and how to play it over on the BS Zelda (that's "Broadcast Satellite") section of the Zelda Legends website.

Pokémon Snap stands as one of the most unique and beloved Pokémon spinoffs, having been released way back in the N64 days and, until recently, never been replicated. Call me a fake fan, though, but I'd never tried the game in my childhood -- I'd seen in in magazines and websites, but the opportunity never showed itself. Until now.

In Snap, you play as as an assistant to Professor Oak, who now has a lab on a deserted island, where he practices Pokémon photography and invents tools to support that new hobby. And, of course, he sends children out to do the hard, dangerous part of the work. Yeah. I thought his casting was strange at first, but the reliance on child labor makes it still in-character.

Anyway, scattered across the island are different biomes inhabited by Pokémon, and your job is to ride the Zero-One -- an on-rails vehicle -- and take pictures of the creatures found along its route. Your pictures are rated by the professor himself based on a few factors, like how clearly they depict their subject and the presence of multiple of that Pokémon in the same picture. As you add better photos to your album, you gain access to other tools that allow you to get different reactions out of the critters you wish to photograph.

I can see why it took Nintendo and Game Freak so long to put out a new one of these. It's a short game that can be beaten in an afternoon, and even if they wanted to make it longer, it's one of those games where the minute of playtime is incredibly expensive for the developer: Snap's stages clearly took a long time to design and implement, yet they take but a few minutes to play through -- the 100% speedrun for the game is about 25 minutes long with no skips. It's easy to see how other more scalable spin-offs wound up being prioritized.

It has to be said, though, Pokémon Snap hasn't aged much. The grading system is the jankiest part, and Pokémon fans that stuck with the franchise over the years will notice some creative liberties -- it's the IP in its infancy, after all -- but the core mechanics are solid and the Pokémon found on the island are given a lot of personality. I can say, with no nostalgia for the game, that it remains a great play today.

I'm looking forward to giving the Switch sequel a shot and seeing how it iterates on the formula.

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.

Years ago, if someone had told me 999 was a name I’d be hearing again over the years, I’d have my doubts about it. The game seemed as niche as can be: It was a visual novel heavy on text and grim undertones that I only ever saw discussed in Japanese games circles. Yet, here we are, with The Nonary Games and Zero Time Dilemma available across a variety of platforms.

I’m unsure how I even came to buy 999. I remember trying it out and having a not so good first impression, then not looking at the game again. I must have seen it on a sale one day and, maybe thinking of giving it a second chance, I brought it home. It remained on my backlog until the day I was looking for a more slow-paced game to play. The day finally came, and gosh, am I ever glad I gave a game a second try.

9 Persons, 9 Hours, 9 Doors, or 999, for short, tells the story of nine people who are kidnapped and trapped on a ship. Their fate is to play the Nonary Game, a perverse and elaborate game that gives them nine hours to go around the ship gathering keys and finding numbered doors in search of an exit, all while their life is on the line.

The first impression is truly bad, mainly because the protagonist, Junpei, is a complete dumbass. he’s one of those dull, “just a normal guy until […]” main characters who are meant to be projected upon and are completely unlikeable as characters. And unlikeable he is, as we spend a bunch of time stuck with him drooling over a female friend who’s also on the ship. Basically, he's male gaze given a name and dialogue box.

Unfortunately, male gaze is a big part of the game. Expect to see impossible boobs and immature jokes, as well as a teenager's idea of romance coming up a lot. There's a Q&A with the author online, and you can tell from that he's not even ashamed of it. Were I to judge the game from the first half an hour, I’d say it was going to be insufferable due to these issues.

Fortunately, however, once we get past the intro, we get less exposed to Junpei’s thoughts and more to the rest of the cast, all of which are much more interesting people than him. Also much more fascinating is the plot of the game, which immediately establishes how high the stakes are, and how horribly everyone will die if they fail the game.

The writing is fantastic. It feels truly novel-like, complete with a very descriptive narrator. This is especially important because of how the game is mostly made up of text and static images. It leaves much more to your imagination, greatly enhancing many of its scenes, especially the more sinister ones. This is an advantage intrinsic to books that visual novels can also make use of.

Unlike their paper counterparts, however, VNs can also make use of sound, and the sound design in 999 reinforces its writing very well. The sound of stepping on metal floors, threading on grimy floors, doors opening, the ship creaking… To say nothing of the excellent soundtrack, which not only appears during cutscenes, but is played during puzzle sections as well.

The gameplay sections in 999 take place in escape rooms. As the game goes on, you’ll be asked to choose doors to go through, and each time you do, Junpei and the characters that accompanied him get trapped into a room and have to find and combine various items to solve puzzles and exit the room.

I like how the difficulty of these sections sits in a nice, comfortable place. The game rewards thoroughness instead of jumping to crazy conclusions, so it’s unlikely you’ll end up in the same situations as in, say, Phoenix Wright, where a very specific item must be used on a specific person because that can incite a reaction you couldn’t possibly know about. In 999, so long as you’re a careful observer, the solution will always be in your grasp.

The escape rooms are half the fun of the game, and it’s great how, the way the endings are laid out, you’ll explore most of the rooms to get them all (only one is technically skippable). This proves to be a double-edged sword when it comes to the endings, however, since they’re mostly decided by your choice of doors.

Picking a door is essentially a blind choice, and even in hindsight it’s hard to figure out by yourself why the game ends in certain ways if you take certain paths. I was lucky to find the true ending path by accident, but a friend missed it by a room and was met with a seemingly inevitable fate, which frustrated him. To me, it was pretty logical why that happened, but I happened to know something he couldn’t have.

This is, of course, a moot point in The Nonary Games, which fixed this issue by having a flowchart and adding the ability to skip back and forth in the game. In the DS version, you kinda need a guide to make sure you don’t waste a bunch of time getting repeat endings.

Regardless of the version you play on, the twist that leads to the true ending, and the fact that you cannot get that ending on your first try, is some of the most amazing video game storytelling I’ve seen. 999 is the kind of narrative that you can only create in a videogame, nowhere else.

I might have my gripes with 999, but it stands that it was a fantastic experience, both story and gameplay-wise. The original DS version, which is what I played, might be hard to locate nowadays, but fortunately, the game is available on the Nonary Games collection, which I recommend picking up wholeheartedly. Always nice to see these games preserved somehow.

(Back to the Q&A with the author, it caught me by surprise how the author justified Lotus’s outfit with “she likes it” (Q8) and insisted her breasts are not implants, they’re “all natural” (Q70). Sheesh. Could he really not have made up a better excuse? The game establishes she’s out of a job, so why didn’t he say “she’s working part-time as a dancer” instead of digging an even bigger hole? The woman has two daughters to feed, has bills to pay, I would have bought it. And what’s so important about a character’s breasts being implants or not?

This juvenile attitude coming from an otherwise very capable writer is so emblematic of the boys’ club mentality pervasive in the gaming industry, it’s sickening.)

eversion (noun): a turning or being turned outward or inside out.

Eversion is a cutesy platformer about flowers and trees and the sun and happy things. It's just a game where you jump on monsters, rescue a princess, you know, just like your average heroic quest. Or is it?

It's a game with a twist, one that, as soon as the main gameplay gimmick is introduced, could be seen coming from a mile away even a decade ago, even before a gazillion indie games would try the same thing in the years that followed. Nowadays, Eversion feels like a bit of a relic.

Credit were credit is due, though, it's a functional game, unlike many other gimmick platformers of its time.

Mega Man X6 is what you would get if you took the bad parts of X5 as the standard for a new game and then half-assed the whole thing. Which is, in fact, more or less what happened: The game is a sequel to what was supposed to be the series finale, and was rushed out in order to make a christmas release date and milk the series just a tad bit further while the PS2 gained an install base.

Not that it takes someone telling you that the game was rushed to realize it. X6 is a further visual downgrade from X5, and is home to the most garish pixel art I've ever seen in a high-profile franchise. Sprites have bad shading and use visually clashing colors, much like what you'd see in fan modifications back in the day. A lot of the spritework is clearly unfinished and lacks animations, and the character design itself just feels bland and out of place.

That's, of course, what you get from a surface observation. Playing the game is actually much worse, and you get to feel just how little effort was put into developing it. X6 is home to both the worst bosses and worst stages up to this point in the franchise, both areas of the game having been developed without much regard for consistency or balance.

Stage design revolves around cluttering the screen with enemies and/or projectiles, as well as having lots of instant death traps. Plus, almost all stages involve a stupid gimmick that doesn't fit the game and detracts from the experience, such as a randomly assembling the stage from a pool of areas, a cheaply made, artificially difficult miniboss that you have to fight five to six times in a row, or having to hunt for small destructible objects before proceeding. It's all a big joke, and the final stages are the punchline, requiring highly specific loadouts to even get through them.

To further complicate things, nightmare effects take place whenever you exit a stage. For instance, when you leave the fire stage, other stages may have fireballs falling from the sky, and the ice stage makes other stages have ice physics. Of course, of all the things the game spends a good minute explaining, this system isn't one of them, and because a lot of nightmare effects run counter to the stages' "design" (if you can call it that), it makes some infuriating experiences even more frustrating.

It gets worse: there's an optional boss thing going on like the one in X2, but instead of making a plain old door where you go in, kick butt and come out, they make this whole detour of a secret area that's basically a stage within the stage. Except it's no secret at all -- a lot of them are easier to find than the end of the stage itself, so you can end up in this really hard area early in the game entirely by accident. In that regard, it's worth noting that, unlike ANY other Mega Man game, you can get softlocked in X6 stages due to not having a power-up or weapon, being then forced to suicide into picking stage select, which speaks volume about the care given to the level design.

To make things even more foul, there's this gimmick now where every stage has named reploids to rescue, and they permanently die if a certain enemy attacks them before you reach them. This enemy often spawns right next to the reploid, and in one instance, right on top of them, meaning the only way to save these NPCs is often to clairvoyantly kamikaze towards them. If you miss them and they get caught? Well, too bad, you have to load from the last save and restart the stage.

This is not just a completionist thing: the abysmal parts system from X5 is back, except now, parts don't come from bosses, but from those lost reploids, and again, because the stage design often demands specific loadouts, you can get screwed pretty bad if you lose the wrong one to the Nightmare Virus.

These parts, whether they improve damage or movement, are often a stopgap for the armors you get completely sucking. Don't even think about playing normal X because some stages are plain impossible as him. You begin the game with a gimped Falcon Armor and later get to choose between the Blade Armor and Shadow Armor. The latter disables air dashing and special weapons (and is ugly as hell), while the former is marginally better than Falcon, but not by much, and it has this accursed downwards dash that's super easy to trigger on the dualshock d-pad and killed me literal dozens of times when above a gap -- Gaze sends his regards.

Ah yes, Gaze. Let's talk about bosses. X6's Bosses are in at least one of three categories: complete pushovers, tedious or utter abominations. Most of the first eight bosses fall into the first category: they have one or two attacks and are beatable with the buster and your eyes closed. The rest of the eight mavericks, as well as the optional bosses, are also not hard, but they make you wait until they are vulnerable to attack, which drags the fight for a good several minutes.

But the absolute king stuff comes at the end of the game, where there are bosses you have to damage race and/or get insanely lucky in order to beat. Nightmare Mother is a bad joke, a blocky sprite that slides around and spams the screen. And Gaze? The guy literally has the power to lag the game as an attack, and you can hardly damage him without damaging yourself in the same amount. Have fun, and hope the Blade Armor doesn't throw you straight into the pit.

I can rant on this game for a while longer. Stuff like Zero being handwaved back into the plot, or again most powerups being restricted to X. The fact is, every second spent with X6 is time spent in misery. It is a thoroughly terrible game.

Franchises need to end at some point, or at least be rebooted. The fact that the X franchise kept running up to when it got to this is just so heartbreaking for someone who grew up playing the original X. The sickest part? There's still two games to go. And they say X7 is worse than this. I worry for my sanity.

Recently, it has become popular to make games that either don't feature combat, or in which combat takes a back seat as crafting, building and farming take the lead. This is a positive trend, to me, but like all trends in gaming, it's one that also often goes wrong, with designers failing to understand player motivations for the genres they're working on and, in this particular trend's case, creating games where the chore part is treated as the goal of the experience. This usually only results in a bland, boring game that you forget about as soon as you're done playing -- it wasn't until Forager that one of those managed to really offend me.

Forager is a mix of adventure and builder that does a lot of things, none of them well. It is also number-go-up taken to an extreme: the chore for the sake of the chore, the grind a means and an end. There is no story, there is no quest, there is no motivator for the player whatsoever. You expand your land so you can get more money so you can expand your land further. You collect stuff because it's there and you might as well, not because there's a reason to. It's an utterly joyless experience with nothing to offer but the cheap dopamine rushes from a game saying you accomplished something.

The real kicker, though, is that Forager is all that, and it's one of the most self-aggrandizing pieces of media I have ever seen. The game's synopsis cites inspirations from Zelda and Terraria, and... I can see the Zelda part if I squint, but "Terraria" is baffling -- Forager is as similar to that game as it is to any other with a crafting system. I doubt the creator understands what makes Terraria fun. Speaking of him, though, he makes several appearances in-game as some sort of in-universe god-figure, and every time he bores you with terrible jokes and with him going off about his own interests. It's like a bad Tinder date you paid a $20 Uber to be at.

And it looks hideous, especially in the late game where some of the art was apparently crowd-sourced. And it's buggy: it's been out for three, nearing four years already, and you still can't trust it to not crash or present game-breaking bugs.

So, thinking of buying Forager? How about you spend your hard earned money on an Excel course instead? It will probably take less of your time, the spreadsheets you'll work on will be more charming and engaging, and by the end, you'll even have a new, marketable skill! A much better investment than this garbage.

Here's one that I still come back to from time to time when I have a few minutes to kill. KAMI is a puzzle game that describes itself as "deceptively simple", and I find that to be a fair way of putting it. Its central mechanic, which, despite the title, is not really about paper, but about color, is easy to pick up as soon as you start playing.

Every puzzle in KAMI is an image formed by squares of different colors. You pick a color and click a square: that square will change color, and so will all squares of the same color connected to it -- like using the bucket tool on MS Paint. The goal is to, in a limited number of bucket-fills, make it so the whole puzzle area has the same color. There are dozens of stages of increasing difficulty, but all revolve around this basic concept.

Aside from the fun and approachable gameplay, the reason I come back to KAMI so much is its soothing aesthetics. Menus have calm music which turns to silence when a puzzle begins, and from there, all you hear is the sound of folding paper as colors spread. It looks great, too: all made using stop-motion with real paper, a trademark of the studio also seen in games like Lume. It's a great game to unwind to, even when later levels start upping the difficulty.

Symphony of the Night didn't just change the Castlevania franchise, it solidified the genre that is now known as a Metroidvania. It is a pivotal game in gaming history. Breaking away from the series's tradition, it transformed Dracula's castle into a huge, nonlinear, sidescrolling map, and added RPG elements into the mix, a new formula that would be copied for decades to come.

The game features Alucard, Dracula's son returning from CVIII, breaking into Dracula's castle to stop his dad from getting resurrected again. Let me just say that Alucard is the coolest Castlevania protagonist, both in concept and appearance. Both his relationship to the antagonist, as well as his spritework and how way he moves in a floaty, supernatural way, are one of the most striking parts of the experience.

And the protagonist is especially important because, like Rondo of Blood before it, Symphony of the Night takes a step further towards fleshing out the narrative for CV games: there's other characters around the castle, there's cutscenes, there's a twist, there's multiple endings... Combine them with the new level design and gameplay systems, and it's impossible to look at later CV games and not see how much of SotN is in them.

However, replaying it in 2022, it's hard not to see the rough spots, too, and how later games would do SotN's formula way better. It hurts to see how the game's balance is completely wacky: some sections and bosses are too hard, others too easy. There's intimidating, but completely unthreatening enemies, while some puny ones can deal massive damage, and attacks that go through walls are a dime a dozen. Equipment you get is all over the place in terms of stats. Etcetera.

All of these issues are compounded in the inverted castle, and/or when playing as one of the alternate characters. The inverted castle is a pretty cool idea, but it's less fun to play than I remember. There's no real progression, since you enter it with all of Alucard's powers already unlocked, and enemy compositions are completely random. Plus, you spend a lot of time as a bat, since there wasn't that much thought put towards traversal while on the ceiling.

Still, considering how much of a departure it was from the usual CV formula, and how many new things it tried, it's incredible how much SotN got right on the first try. It's still a very solid game, even in 2022.

Stacklands is a twist on management games: every object in the game, from people to buildings to resources to money, is represented by a card on the game board. These cards interact through being stacked on top of one another, causing an item to be equipped, a building to be built from the required materials, or a production cycle to be initiated. By producing excess goods and selling them, the player can buy booster packs, which unlock new cards and new recipes for buildings and items. Over time, new areas are unlocked, as well as powerful foes to do battle against.

The game takes place over turns called moons, which last for a few real time minutes. At the end of each moon, all your villagers have to be fed -- if there's not enough food cards, unfed villagers will starve and die. Aside from that, random events may occur between moons, some of which force your people into battle, and that may also result in their demise. Either way, should you run out of people cards at any moment, the game ends. It's easy to understand in theory, but Stacklands teaches little and forces the player to learn everything from experience, making the early game rocky. And that is but the first of its problems.

What could have been an outstanding game is merely fine, thanks to some questionable design choices and a rough execution. In Stacklands. annoyance is part of the game's mechanics: cards collide with one another and push each other off to the sides, messing up the board and adding some annoying glitches to the mix. Some cards allow for making compact stacks of the same type of card, or guiding your villagers towards certain foods, but those take time and resources to make and only solve part of the problems. Fundamentally, though, the floatiness of the game's objects eliminates their physicality as cards, downgrading Stacklands from an interesting card game to a more generic management one.

There's also a severe lack of quality of life options. If playing on the Steam Deck, you'll immediately feel it in your hands: the controller support is awful, if not on its own, because of glitches stemming from a misuse of Unity's (admittedly terrible) UI navigation system. That the game should not have the Steam Deck Verified seal is a given, but even playing with a mouse, the UI could have been so much more helpful, like by allowing for certain shortcuts, warning about finished tasks, or the presence and position of enemies and the like. It could also provide more guidance, not just in the beginning of the game, but also, when you're about to do something that would, I don't know, summon an incredibly powerful boss that might end your run or something.

On that note, Stacklands should not have had permadeath. Yes, I know card-based roguelikes are all the rage nowadays, but that doesn't mean just any card-adjacent game should have permadeath in it: a full run of Stacklands with the current updates takes upwards of ten hours. Imagine dying to the final boss and having to redo everything -- I almost feel bad for saying Dead Cells had it bad with its deaths. A save option, even if it was a consumable item you had to create with rare materials, would have been welcome.

My main memory of this game is owning Putt-Putt at checkers over and over, but then always having that goddamn bear snipe away all my pieces in reversi. Anyway.

This is a pretty solid offering, with fifteen games packed into one, well, Activity Pack. True, some are filler, but in general, it's a great package for small kids and their developing brains, especially games like Memory, Tangram, Guesses and such. If I ever do have children, I guess I'll have to pull these out, as they don't make kids' games like this anymore.